


all our unwanted pieces left under the ice

by patrokla



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Aftermath of Possession, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canadian Shack, Canon-typical references to bestiality, Drunk Sex, Dubiously Erotic Sex, Episode: s03e05 A Life in the Day, F/F, F/M, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Queer Friendship, Reunions, Suicidal Ideation, a lot of emotions for something that was supposed to be tropey!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-02-29 06:37:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18773254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrokla/pseuds/patrokla
Summary: "The Long Winter, as Eliot remembers it, and as Tick still insists on explaining twice that day, is exactly as it sounds: a long fucking winter."Or, the one where Eliot, Margo, and Quentin get snowed in at Castle Whitespire after getting rid of the Monster.





	1. A Whole Case of Lorian Whiskey

**Author's Note:**

> Oh gosh. I started this over a month ago, and have spent an unprecedented amount of time fiddling with it, to the point that I think I might be over-fiddling, so - I'm putting up the first part. I'm a little nervous! Trying a lot of new things (for me) that I really hope work but might not. Let me know!
> 
> This fic takes place in a very alternate post-s4 landscape. This wasn't really on purpose - when I first started writing I was still catching up on the first half of the season. The fic sort of spins off after 4x05 - Eliot came to some realizations about his feelings while he was possessed, Quentin had a very shitty time with the Monster, Margo is no longer High King, and none of the Margo/Josh or Alice/Quentin or Fillory time jump stuff happened. 
> 
> It started out as a spin on the classic Canadian shack trope, but has really gotten away from me since then. I'd say at this point it's about aftermaths: of living in your own memories for months, of working singlemindedly towards a goal and (horror of horrors) achieving it, of sacrifices with consequences. But also, yknow, there's a lot of snow, and hugs, and feelings.
> 
> Re: pairing tags, this part is very Eliot/Margo-centric, for which I make no apologies. Future parts contain more Quentin/Eliot and Margo/A Mysterious Personage (I'm sure you can all guess, but I'll tag it when it actually happens). 
> 
> Title from [ this post](https://johndarnielle.tumblr.com/post/71070347081/its-time-its-time-to-unleash-upon-the-world-the) by John Darnielle. 
> 
> You can find me on [tumblr](https://leguin.tumblr.com) and, recently, [dreamwidth](https://patrokla.dreamwidth.org/).

❝I’m tired, can’t think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that through all eternity.❞

 Franz Kafka, _Letters to Milena_

 

 

 

 

_—  
_

The first thing Margo says upon Eliot’s triumphant post-possession arrival in Whitespire is, “I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news.”  
  
Eliot’s life wouldn’t be his life if it didn’t involve an unending series of terrible events, so he barely bothers to feel worried by this greeting. He does wish she’d given him a moment to get past the castle's huge, drafty welcoming chamber, which is cold even at the height of summer, let alone during the chilly knife’s edge between autumn and winter.  
  
“Good news first,” he says. Possession has made him tolerant and optimistic; unless the bad news is that _Margo_ is now being controlled by a cruel god-child, whatever it is really can’t be worse than anything that’s happened to them recently.  
  
“Good news, you’ve shown up just in time for both of us to make it off of Fillory’s ‘Rulers We Hate’ shitlist. Mostly because we’re both ex-rulers.” That's an awfully casual pronouncement of something Eliot’s still personally not thrilled about, and he’s a little surprised by her blasé attitude, when she continues, “Fen’s running the show right now, I’m her right-hand woman, it’s been a whole thing.”  
  
Eliot files Margo’s tiny smirk and ’a whole thing’ under the growing list of Shit He Missed Because of the Monster, and goes with it, aiming for regal indifference as he asks, “And this is good news because?”  
  
“Because, and here’s where the bad news comes in, this means we have rooms in Whitespire that we can stay in for the Long Winter, which you’ve also shown up just in time for.” Margo pauses for a moment, then adds, “This is where you ask what the Long Winter is, El.”  
  
The Long Winter. Oh, he knows. Christ, the timing in Fillory really is impeccable - if he hadn’t seen Ember and Umber die with his own eyes, he’d almost think that this was one of their sadistic designs.  
  
“I remember it,” Eliot murmurs, once the urge to laugh hysterically passes. Margo raises an eyebrow, but pushes on.    
  
“Then you know that once the snow starts to fall we’ll be stuck in the castle for the next few months.”  
  
“Which is not exactly the Fillorian vacation that the doctor ordered?”  
  
“Well,” Margo shrugs, “Not unless you’re suddenly into hibernation. What I’m saying is, if you want to find somewhere else to lay low -“  
  
“No,” Eliot says, too abruptly or - jerkily, Monster-like in some way, because Margo’s mouth presses together like she’s trying not to let it, so he adds, “I want to be here.”  
  
“Good,” Margo says briskly, and then, mouth tilting up the barest amount, “I want you here too.”  
  
—  
  
The Long Winter, as Eliot remembers, and as Tick insists on explaining twice in the next day, is exactly as it sounds: a long fucking winter. It happens a few times a century, sometimes more (“although a lot of people on the message boards thought that was just Plover taking a dig at Narnia,” Quentin had informed Eliot, decades and decades ago), and the heavy snows and sub-zero temperatures tend to completely shut down Fillory’s surprisingly adequate roads between the northern border and the newly-regrown Southern Orchards.  
  
“In the past, rulers of Fillory have often relocated to a warmer climate to wait out the snow, but due to the, ah, _confusion_ of the past months, the opportunity to do so is no longer available,” Tick says, more to Fen and Margo than Eliot, who as former royalty is apparently largely inconsequential to Tick’s world now. “Fortunately, the castle is fully stocked with supplies to last three months, in the event of plague, or siege, or-”  
  
“Yeah, we get it, Tick. What about everyone else?” Margo asks, which makes Fen smile. “Are we just letting them fend for themselves while getting buried under a ton of white bullshit?”  
  
“Not _exactly_ ,” Tick says delicately - evasively, really, which sets off a long round of debates over the Fillorian grain supply that Eliot only half-listens to, content to simply hear new conversations.  
  
If his dad could see him now, consenting to listen to extensive discussions on fucking grain, of all things, he’d - well, Eliot likes to think that this would actually be pretty low on the long list of things about his life that would send his dad into immediate cardiac arrest. But it'd definitely be on there.  
  
Of course the conversation is secondary, really, to the sights. The castle, its heavy stone and flickering torches so different from the Physical Kids Cottage. Fen, looking Fen-like in a new crown-wearing way, watching Tick and Margo with keen eyes and only barely hesitating at voicing her own decisions. And Margo, Margo most of all, Margo most important. He sits at the table and watches her, letting the remembered version of her fade away in the face of real, genuine Margo.  
  
He missed her, something he’s only willing to admit to himself now that he has her again. Missing her while he was stuck in his own head would’ve felt too much like admitting that he was really and truly stuck there. It would’ve made it impossible for him to summon memories of her and take solace in them for a few minutes, a few hours, an eternity of echoes and imitations.  
  
He’s still not really willing to admit that he thought he might be stuck there forever, the scenery only changing when his body was destroyed or abandoned and his mind was dragged along into the next idiot trying to prevent a tragedy. But he isn’t stuck, not anymore, and Margo is the whole of herself again, not just the best parts that he’d saved in technicolor. And he’s missed her.  
  
—  
  
“So,” Margo says, four days after his arrival and three days before the first storm will hit, according to the prophetic fish in the courtyard fountain, “ready to talk?”  
  
They’re lounging in the dining chamber of her new rooms, which are his old rooms. Tick had relegated him to one of the ‘friends and family’ suites down a poky little hallway in the East Wing. He’d been offended, of course, but it does feel refreshingly like a clean slate. If nothing else, it’s nice to sleep in a different bed than the one he and Fen had had so much terrible, awkward not-really-sex in. He thinks Fen might feel the same way, given she'd let Margo take the High King's rooms despite officially only being a Royal Advisor.  
  
Margo’s room has a bigger fire than Eliot's, and large, comfortable chairs, so that’s where they’ve convened for the evening, glasses of awful Fillorian wine in hand. It’s a scene that echoes back in Eliot’s mind to Brakebills, to other rooms in Whitespire, to the cottage, to Quentin, to he and Margo as first years, stupidly confident and fundamentally lost but for each other. He wouldn’t re-live all the years that came before for anything, but he does miss how simple the world had seemed back then.  
  
“What should we talk about?” Eliot feints, stalling for time, because there’s no good way to admit that he’s forgotten how to talk in the last few months. He’s gotten very, very good at remembering, and regretting, and pretending to himself that all he needed to right his wrongs was a chance back in the real world. His conversational skills, however, have dulled.  
  
“The view from your new room,” Margo drawls. “What do you think, asshole?”  
  
“There’s not much to say,” Eliot says, in lieu of admitting that there’s not much he _can_ say, but Margo knows him. Maybe only in this little universe, but nevertheless she knows him all the way down to his core, where despite his best efforts he’s never changed. She looks at him like she sees him, and not the Monster. Like she doesn’t want them to waste any more time - and just like that, he cracks open a little.  
  
“I -“ he starts, and then, after an exhale of wine-tinged breath, “I actually don’t know what it did, all that time. I only got out once, to - ” see Quentin, he doesn’t say, “I was just in my head, the whole time. With the last guy that it had possessed. Charlton.”  
  
“I’m glad,” Margo says bluntly. “You shouldn’t have to know.”  
  
“Shouldn’t I?” he asks, before he can think better of it. “I mean, let’s face it, Margo. I’m the reason the Monster got out, I’m the one it possessed - and I got to spend a year dreaming up new cocktails while everyone I care about had to clean up the mess.”  
  
Margo eyes him like she knows he's full of shit, which is fair enough, but she doesn’t say anything. The crackling fire reflects off of her glass as she drains it and begins to tap her finger on the rim.  
  
“Listen,” she says finally, “if you’re looking for someone to blame you for everything that happened, you’re in the wrong castle. For one thing, I got you that damn gun in the first place. It could’ve been me who shot the Monster -“  
  
“But it wasn’t,” Eliot interrupts, feeling suddenly ill at the thought of having to see Margo as anyone other than herself.  
  
“But it could’ve been,” she says firmly. “As far as I’m concerned, about fifty percent of this whole mess was just our shit-awful luck. And the other fifty percent sure as hell ain’t all on you.”  
  
Eliot can’t help but let out a bitter little laugh at that.  
  
“If it’s not on me, then why are we the only ones who came back to Fillory? Why couldn't anyone even look at me?” he asks. _Why won’t Quentin_ -, he doesn’t start, because there’s pathetic and there’s Pathetic, and he really doesn’t want to edge into the latter.  
  
Margo sighs, then pours herself another glass of wine.  
  
“I don’t think either of us are drunk enough to have this conversation,” she says.  
  
“Agreed,” Eliot says, desperately grabbing at the familiar out she’s offering, like a coward. Like he told himself he wouldn’t do.  
  
“So here’s what I’m thinking,” Margo says, after drinking half the glass in a long, smooth motion. “We finish this bottle of -“  
  
“A loathsome, disgusting excuse for wine -“ Eliot inserts.  
  
“ - this horrible fucking wine,” Margo continues, “and then we crack open a bottle of the hard stuff. I’ve got a whole case of Lorian whiskey from my red wedding.”  
  
“Sounds perfect,” Eliot says, floating his glass over to clink it against hers. Then he winks, just because he feels like it, and maybe a little because it's what he does in all the memories in his head. Margo smiles at him familiarly, fondly, and leans over to kiss him on the mouth.  
  
—  
  
They’re a bottle into the case of surprisingly decent Lorian whiskey when someone knocks nervously on the door to Margo’s chambers.  
  
“Kinda in the middle of something, Tick!” Margo calls, before turning her attention back to Eliot.  
  
“Keep going,” she says, sliding a hand into his hair and tugging him back into place between her thighs. It’s slightly awkward positioning; she’s sprawled out on the edge of her chair and he’s on his knees, half-bent over to get his mouth and fingers where she wants them.  
  
This definitely doesn’t reach the heights of their sublime, depraved, erotic youth, but Eliot has to admit that there is something both comforting and arousing about it all. The way she pulls his hair when he slides two fingers into her and presses his tongue against her clit, the warmth and slickness and the newly-unfamiliar bristle of hair (“I’ve had better things to do,” she’d said, stepping out of her skirts) against his face, and the heat of her skin where his own stubble has rubbed against it.  
  
It grounds him, the sensations of Margo all around him, and all the things he feels for her right at the surface. This deep, deep well of love he has for her, the knowledge that she feels the same - the shiny exciting newness of this reciprocity wore off for both of them years ago, but after months and months without her he’s feeling grateful, and relieved. He crooks his fingers, rocking them a little, and the rhythmic motion sweeps him back through his memories. Back to the first time he'd done this and enjoyed it, done it and gotten the whole point of it, during that week of winter break their first year at Brakebills, when they’d finally let themselves learn each other. They’d had to keep opening the windows of their rooms in the Cottage, letting bitterly cold air in and the overwhelming smell of wine and sex out, drifting over the empty campus.

They hadn't spent longer than that week in their own little bubble, he and Margo - not sexually, really, but in another sense they hadn't left it for years. Not until the worst days in Fillory. They'd picked up a lot of thirds, sometimes spun away from each other for a night and then come back again the next. Eliot had never thought that he'd find someone like Margo, someone who was a part of him always, who was most important, _always_ , but he had, and they had - they had worked, until Mike-  
  
He pulls back from the memories (hadn't even meant to get caught up in them, why is it so easy?) and sucks on her clit, apologetic. Margo moans, which is gratifying because it’s Margo, because he _knows_ her, knows what she likes, and he likes doing it. He’s good at it, too, which is why she lets him - Margo loves him, but bad pity sex has never been on the table between them. It’s her moan that makes him realize, a little distantly and slowly through the wine, whiskey, and deluge of feelings, that he’s hard for the first time since...before Blackspire? (He hopes, anyway, and isn’t that a nauseating thought?).  
  
Her nails run across his scalp as she curls the hand in his hair and tugs a little, firmly, and he moves away from the Monster and closer to her, closing space that doesn’t really exist.  
  
“Mm, put -“ she starts, before another, more insistent round of knocking begins. “Jesus Christ, Tick, just open the goddamn door! Or shout through it!”  
  
She lets go of his hair and he reluctantly pulls back and straightens up a little, mentally noting that the fur rug in front of her fireplace is great on his knees.  
  
The door opens a crack and Tick pops his head through, looking utterly unsurprised to see Eliot on the floor, his mouth and chin wet, and Margo wearing only an open shirt and an underskirt rucked up to her waist.  
  
“Begging pardon, your advisory majesty, but there’s a visitor in the welcoming hall who insists on speaking to you.”  
  
“Cut the suspense, Tick,” Margo snarls (zero to one hundred, Eliot thinks, fondly) standing up and pulling her clothes back into reasonable, but still thoroughly indecent order. “What visitor is so goddamn important that you had to interrupt me in the middle of the night?”  
  
“Well,” Tick says hesitantly, “It’s the former King Quentin.”  
  
“What?” Eliot says, standing before Tick has finished saying Q’s name. “How did he get here?”  
  
“I’m afraid that's still unclear. He hasn’t been terribly coherent since he arrived. According to the guards he appeared in the middle of the summer garden, which, as you know, has a pond in it, and somehow fell right in, despite its totally frozen state,” Tick says, irritatingly matter-of-fact, as though Quentin dropping into Fillory through an icy pond happened every day.  
  
“Alright, fine, we’re coming,” Margo says, irritation falling short in the face of a probably hypothermic, definitely in the middle of a bad plan Quentin.  
  
Eliot is halfway to the door before Tick coughs pointedly and says, “Former High King Eliot, I’m afraid former King Quentin requested that he see Royal Advisor Margo alone.”  
  
Eliot takes half a second to shove away all the Quentin-related memories that threaten to appear at Tick's words, then forces himself to relax.  
  
“Of course he did,” he says, smiling wryly at Tick, who really doesn’t matter, and who is giving Eliot a unacceptably familiar look of pity.  
  
“I’ll be in my rooms, Bambi,” Eliot says, and leaves before she can say anything. He brushes past Tick with a muttered, “Make sure to bring him a change of clothes,” and retreats, retreats, retreats.  
  
—  
  
So, Quentin doesn’t want to see him. That’s not news. It’s the opposite of news. It had, in fact, been one of the first things Eliot had been told when he woke up in the Brakebills infirmary, burning with fever and half out of his mind with pain.  
  
Penny 23 had been there, of all people, and he’d tried to distract Eliot from his hoarse-voiced questions by telling him Margo would be back soon, which she was, Professor Lipson in tow.  
  
“I told her to give you the good painkillers,” Margo told him, gripping one of his hands almost painfully hard. Somewhere behind the pain and the guilt he was over the moon, seeing her, but he knew she was okay - okay as they ever were, and he didn’t know that about -  
  
“Quentin,” Eliot rasped for what felt like the fifteenth time, and Margo gave him this fucking - this _gentle_ look and said, “He just needs some time, okay?”  
  
Eliot doesn’t recall how he’d responded to that, if he’d responded at all, because the painkillers had kicked in then and they were, as Margo promised, the good shit.  
  
He’d woken up three days later desperately wanting a shower, coffee, Margo, and Quentin, not particularly in that order, and Margo had had to tell him all over again that Quentin needed some time, that he’d had a rough few months, that he would’ve been there if he could, et cetera et fucking cetera. Then she’d asked him how he felt about rehabbing in Fillory, once Lipson cleared him to leave, and now here they all are, weeks later, and Quentin still doesn’t want to see him.  
  
Eliot collapses into a chair in his bedchamber and looks out his window. He lets himself feel jealous of Margo having his old rooms, which had _three_ windows, and almost gives himself a migraine while trying furiously not to think about Quentin and all the reasons why he’d be avoiding Eliot.  
  
Most of them are horrible and/or bloody and/or involve the Monster greedily, wantingly taking and taking and taking from Quentin. Eliot wants to know and doesn’t want to know, and the latter feeling is selfish in a way that he doesn’t want to be with Quentin, not anymore. It’s a terrified feeling, borne out of the fear that he’s done something - that his body has done something to Quentin that can’t be forgiven or moved past. If he could just see Quentin and figure out what it was, then he’d feel better. Maybe.  
  
But after everything Quentin’s gone through, Eliot can’t bring himself to ignore this request for solitude. He sighs and leans forward in the chair, resting his head against the cold glass.  Thick snowflakes have begun to fall and clump on the ground, obscuring the garden that his room overlooks.  
  
He watches the snow fall, three days ahead of schedule, and doesn't think about Quentin, and doesn't think about Quentin, and does _not_ think about Quentin. He doesn't think about Quentin. But he does think that the prophetic fish might be a fucking liar.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter: Eliot hydrates, Margo negotiates. Quentin talks to a bear.


	2. The Only People in the World

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we find out what Quentin's been up to, and what Eliot and Quentin got up to a long time ago.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Two! Honestly, I thought it'd take longer. Everyone's comments (and subscriptions!) have been very encouraging.
> 
> Blanket disclaimer going forward: narrators, not always reliable. People, often fallible. This will become increasingly relevant in the next two chapters, but I figured I'd get ahead of things.

Eliot falls asleep late in the night after a glass of mulled wine, still smothering memories of Quentin. It’s this last action that likely leads to that night’s dreams about a past life. Sometimes his dreams are nightmares, and the lives he sees are ones he doesn’t remember living - bloody visions that are impossible to explain except by some fluke of time magic. Since the Monster, however, his dreams tend towards the memories constantly surfacing in his mind of lives he does remember. One life in particular, tonight. One long life, and a long winter.  
  
—  
  
Winters at the cottage are generally mild, only a little snow, and all of it light and powdery. Eliot suspects that the magic of the Mosaic is partly to thank for this; their closest neighbor two miles down the road regularly gets snowed in.  
  
It’s a good thing, obviously, that they’re able to work on the Mosaic in all four seasons, but the first few years, Eliot sometimes finds himself wishing for the heavy winters of his childhood. Winter was the one season in Indiana when there was almost no farm work to be done, soybeans being a warm weather crop, and Eliot had been able to keep to himself with no questions asked or excuses needed. It would be nice, he thought, to have a justifiable reason for not spending the day moving tiles and inevitably cataloging the failed pattern as the sun went down. If the alternative to laying down tiles involved laying down with Q, wrapped in blankets or spread out in front of the fire, well. Who could blame him for wanting that?  
  
And then Teddy arrives, and all thoughts of snow days to spend in the cottage with Q are swept out of Eliot’s head. For the first few years of Teddy’s life, he and Arielle and Quentin schedule the quest around their son. There are days, especially during the intensely miserable weeks Teddy has colic, that they don’t do a pattern at all. Eliot tries to feel guilty, fails, and eventually stops trying to summon the feeling up. Quentin, he knows, never stops feeling bad. He and Arielle fight about it sometimes, about “priorities” and “gods-damned quests.” Arielle is a remarkably understanding woman, but Eliot thinks that a small part of her had expected Quentin to give up the quest just a little as time went on. Frankly, Eliot had expected something similar. He’d underestimated Quentin’s ability to dedicate himself to a task that was so thankless and impossible. They both had.  
  
Their Long Winter comes almost two decades into their time in Fillory. Teddy is nearly grown, coltish and impatient with them in a way Eliot recognizes. Arielle is gone, has been for over a decade, time enough that Eliot no longer thinks about her every day, but still feels raw when he does. Quentin, stubbornly bearded and comfortably middle-aged, has recently set into the Mosaic with a new fervor that Eliot suspects is really just nerves about Teddy growing and going right before their eyes.  
  
Winter that year arrives as it usually does, the garden that Eliot had planted outside their home withering in on itself as the weather cools. Quentin puts Teddy to work chopping kindling and stacking firewood in a storage lean-to that Q had build with his own hands (and magic) their second winter in Fillory. The wood’s not strictly necessary - both Eliot and Quentin make magical fires regularly. But Teddy is, so far, distinctly unmagical (Eliot generally feels relief over this), and Quentin’s of the mind that it’s important for him to learn how to do all the mundane tasks that come with running a household in a pre-industrial society. Eliot agrees, but is more persuaded by the argument that anything that exhausts some of Teddy’s boundless, restless energy is a good thing.  
  
For his part, Eliot puts Quentin to work helping with the apple butter and plum preserves that he makes every winter. Quentin remains unrepentantly awful at all things culinary, but he takes instruction well enough, so Eliot feels confident about leaving him in charge of stirring and checking the slowly-reducing apples. They never put in their own orchard, but Teddy and Eliot help with nearby harvests most autumns, and the portion they get in return is enough to mix up the usual winter fare of bread, hard cheese, and a variety of root vegetable stews.  
  
So winter arrives as usual; the cottage smelling like crisp air and apples and herbs, and after two decades Eliot still looks around and wonders how he lucked into a truly good life. Then the air goes from cool to cold, and the thyme plants Eliot usually coaxes through the winter and back to spring die overnight. Quentin goes to consult with Lai, the local historian, and comes back looking pinched, shoulders tight with anxiety.  
  
“She says all the signs point to a long, heavy winter,” he tells Eliot and Teddy over dinner that night. “There hasn’t been one in decades, and I think, if you consider the timing, this might be the ‘winter of many nights’ that the Chatwins were warned about by, hm, I can’t quite recall -“  
  
“By the fisherman at the frozen lake,” Teddy reminds him, a child steeped in new-old-future stories, and Quentin nods rapidly and starts to sketch out a bit of Fillorian history that hasn’t happened yet. Eliot still finds it more endearing than irritating.  
  
“…if that’s the case, then we’ll need to be prepared to be snowed-in for up to two months,” Quentin concludes.  
  
Teddy’s eyes go wide at that, and Eliot’s a little alarmed himself. They keep to themselves most of the time, but they’ve been trading regularly with their neighbors and the nearest merchants for as long as they’ve had anything to trade. Eliot’s come to pride himself on their ability to grow most of their own produce, but flour, dairy products, honey, books? They depend on trade for that, and Eliot lived through those first few spartan years to know the little luxuries make life that much more bearable.  
  
“If that’s the case, we’ll need to travel to Tarybrook for supplies,” he says. “Did Lai know when the snow will arrive?”  
  
“She said not long, maybe a week. I wanted to press for details but she’s preparing for hibernation and not at her most coherent, so.”  
  
“The trials and travails of consulting bear historians,” Eliot quips, and Quentin smiles a little.  
  
“Please tell me that snowed-in doesn't mean I have to stay inside _all winter_ ,” Teddy says, and Eliot shudders dramatically.  
  
“If it comes to that, we’re building you an igloo,” he declares, and Quentin laughs at that, shoulders loosening just a fraction, which Eliot counts as a victory.  
  
It’s feels like a rather adolescent thing to do, counting a laugh as a victory, but that’s where Eliot is these days. He and Quentin are - in flux. That’s the most delicate way to put it, but also the most accurate. Quentin is his co-parent, his questing partner, his best friend. Those things are not in doubt, and never really have been. The rest? The rest, which Eliot scarcely knows how to define, but still selfishly hopes for? That’s always an open question, the answer constantly shifting.  
  
_Quentin_ is constantly shifting. Eliot has never tried to pin him down, because what if - what if what he pins isn’t what he wants? But he gets tired, sometimes, of never knowing where the line for intimacy has been drawn that week. In the months before Arielle, they’d fucked three times a day or once a month, no in-betweens. It was always on Quentin’s terms. Eliot knew what he had to offer, and what he didn’t, and the gulf between the former and what Quentin deserved seemed awfully wide, sometimes, but that didn’t mean he’d give up trying to bridge it.  
  
And then Arielle had arrived. Arielle, who’d seen Eliot and Quentin for the involuted mess that they were and sensibly decided she didn’t want to become part of the entanglement. They _had_ slept together, the three of them, more than a few times. Wine was usually involved, and Eliot never offered, but he always accepted.  
  
Well. Almost always. There’d been nights he’d walked two hours to the nearest pub and looked for someone, anyone, any acceptable substitute. He’d even had a few brief lovers, the most memorable of whom was a curly-haired faun scholar who spent a season cataloging local mushroom types and being fucked by Eliot in a moss-covered hovel twenty minutes from the cottage. Eliot had ended things rather abruptly, around the time that the faun started making noises about meeting parents and seeing the mosaic, and only a month after that, Arielle discovered she was pregnant.  
  
Eliot had expected to spend months on tenterhooks, waiting for Quentin to suggest that it was time Eliot look for his own cottage, but instead he and Arielle had asked him, only days later, what role he wanted to play in their child’s life, and in their relationship. He still wonders whose idea it had been - Arielle’s almost certainly, raised in a family that on Earth would’ve been described by labels like ‘alternative’ and ‘non-traditional.’ Eliot personally wondered at the wisdom of negotiating a polyamorous relationship while preparing for a baby, but in the end, he was selfish. (Or maybe, by some light, brave). With equal measures of terror and relief, he’d washed his hands of any other affairs and dedicated himself to being an actual goddamn parent.  
  
Has he succeeded? It’s cocky to say yes, especially since Teddy hasn’t actually finished growing up, but he watches Quentin and Teddy pore over Quentin’s painstakingly detailed notes on the Fillory books and thinks that at the very least he’s succeeded at something his own parents failed at so thoroughly: having a family.  
  
And isn’t that enough?  
  
Shouldn’t that be enough?  
  
_In his bed at Whitespire, Eliot turns on his side, uneasy with want. The memories threaten to overwhelm him when he’s awake, but in sleep there’s nothing to keep him grounded in the present. The Mosaic memories are strange things, blurry broad strokes with the occasional utterly clear moments that rise to the surface and tempt him to sink into them._  
  
_That winter, their long winter, had passed slowly, days blending into weeks, no reliable way to mark the passage of time, and he can’t be certain, but he doesn’t think it took long for he and Quentin to -_  
  
“You’re sure Teddy went out,” Quentin asks for the third time, the words coming out mumbly against Eliot’s mouth, and Eliot says, “Yeah, yes, with his, mm, his badger friend,” and nips at Quentin’s bottom lip. He feels more distracted by the current situation than Q sounds, which is absolutely unacceptable. He presses kisses against Quentin’s jawline, following it approximately through an unfortunate amount of beard to his neck, and the spot that, if he sucks on it and then grazes his teeth against it, will make Quentin -  
  
Quentin moans, his body pushing up against Eliot’s, and Eliot smiles and pushes back, enjoys the feeling of Quentin, solid and warm and a little fidgety under him. It’s been months, maybe, since they’ve done this, and he’s missed it, always misses it.  
  
“Moss,” Quentin says, apropos of nothing, and Eliot moves down a little, focuses on the place where Quentin’s neck meets his shoulder, while Quentin continues, somewhat breathily, “That’s the badger’s name, I think.”  
  
“Okay,” Eliot says, murmurs, “okay, okay,” as he makes his way down Quentin’s body, punctuating the words with kisses, nuzzling, touching, touching, touching, until he gets to where he’d planned on going, and finally succeeds at driving any thoughts of badgers out of Quentin’s head entirely.  
  
That had been early on, before the snow piled up so high outside the door that Teddy had to burrow out through the front window, with the help of Moss and, sometimes, Eliot’s telekinesis, because the sooner Teddy is gone the sooner Quentin will kiss him. They spend two months like that, safe and warm in the cottage, jam on toast for breakfast, stew for dinner, Eliot whittling little figurines out of wood by magic, Quentin and Teddy reading. And any moment when Teddy is out in the snow, and they have the cottage to themselves - well.  
  
Even after Teddy leaves, first to an apprenticeship with an apothecary, and later to start his own family, they never have another winter like that. Every winter to Eliot’s last is filled by the mosaic, a puzzle whose impossibility he embraces because Quentin embraces it. Later - almost forty years later, in the throne room of Whitespire, Eliot will think about choosing, and how Quentin chose him in a world with so few choices. In a snow-covered cottage, where they were the only people in the world.    
  
—  
  
Royal Advisor and former High King Margo sweeps down the dimly-lit halls of Castle Whitespire. She’s wearing a hastily-retailored dress from her days as High King - Fen doesn’t care, but Tick had just about thrown a fit the first time he’d seen Margo in her old finery, so she’d compromised and had the Royal Tailor get rid of a few bustles and trains. Even without them, she still sweeps through the halls - it’s all in the walk, baby, and Margo has always walked like a king.  
  
Granted, right now she’s walking like a king who got interrupted in the middle of what was shaping up to be some pretty goddamn satisfying reunion sex. She can feel her own wetness and Eliot’s saliva drying unpleasantly on her thighs, and she’s buzzing with arousal that currently has nowhere to go. God knows a half-drowned Quentin Coldwater isn’t going to do much for her, and Eliot - well, Eliot had hurried out of the room with all the grace and goodwill of a grounded teenager. Not that she blames him, really. It was one of those frustrating situations where most of the direct blame no longer had anywhere to go, and Margo no longer finds the idea of putting _all_ of the indirect blame at Alice’s feet too appealing these days. They’d all fucked up, and, she had to grudgingly admit, they’d all tried to atone for their fuck-ups. That got Alice a little credit, in Margo’s eyes. A very, very little.  
  
Not enough credit that Margo had gone to her to try and fix the Quentin Situation, after they’d gotten Eliot back, though. Whatever Alice had been hoping for with Quentin, it was clear the whole thing had once again ended with a whimper - Quentin had obviously been in no state to end things with a bang. Margo hadn’t particularly cared for the details, just gleaned enough to note Alice’s current job with the Library, which would either turn out to be useful or a total disaster. Probably both.  
  
Speaking of total disasters: Quentin.  
  
“Jesus, you’re dripping everywhere,” Margo tells the pathetic huddle of wet clothes and hair standing in the middle of the welcoming hall.  
  
“Sorry,” Quentin says, shaking a little, and she rolls her eyes at him as she casts a drying spell.  
  
“Well,” she says, “it’s good to see you. What the hell are you doing here?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Quentin says, frowning. It makes him look like a befuddled golden retriever, and she resists the urge to mess up his hair. It’s still wet, anyhow.  
  
“Tick says you fell through a pond?”  
  
Tick appears at the sound of his name, seemingly coincidentally, carrying a pair of Fillorian trousers and a shirt.  
  
“Courtesy of former High King Eliot,” he says, grimacing obligatorily at Quentin, whose mouth goes tight at the mention of Eliot.  
  
“Thanks, Tick,” he mutters, and Tick leaves, pointedly walking around the puddle surrounding Quentin.  
  
“You should get changed,” Margo says, casting another drying spell on Quentin. He shivers a little at the magic, then looks down at his now-dry clothes and to Margo, opening his mouth to protest.  
  
“You’re a guest of the court, so dress like it,” she says, before he can start. “Fen’s already introduced snapbacks, we don’t need everyone walking around wearing tragic little hoodies, too.”  
  
“Fine,” Quentin says, and lets Margo walk him through the halls. She has half an idea to just bring him to Eliot’s room, but  - she looks at him, hair still inexplicably damp, exhausted, and resigned to being in Fillory, but not particularly happy about it, and thinks _not yet_.  
  
So she walks past the hallway Eliot’s room is down, and takes him up two flights of stairs that wind around the western tower of the castle, to a high, round room with tall windows. She’s always thought these rooms were a little pokey, a little Sara Crewe-ish, but Quentin looks around with a hint of a smile and sits down on the single bed with slightly less resignation than he’d shown before.  
  
Margo lights the fire in the tiny fireplace with a familiar tut, and joins Q on the bed.  
  
“So,” she starts, “how was the hospital?”  
  
Quentin shrugs, says, “Just, a hospital. You know.”  
  
“Not really.”  
  
He flushes at that, gets off the bed and goes to the windows. There’s nothing much to see, this late at night, except the snow, which tumbles out of the dark and back into it again as it passes the windows.  
  
“How’s Eliot,” he says, turning back to face Margo. It’s barely a question, both his tone and expression flat and miserable.  
  
“Eliot’s fine,” she tells him. “Recovering from being possessed, and then being stabbed, and then being shunted off to Fillory because no one on Earth can make eye contact with him.”  
  
Quentin looks at her, the set of his mouth unreadable, and she sighs.  
  
“Honestly, Q, he’s been worse. He’s - a little distant, sometimes, but he’s doing okay, all things considered.”  
  
_He misses you_ , she doesn’t say, because it’s not fair to Quentin, to put that on him, and not particularly fair to Eliot, who should be able to say it himself.  
  
“I’m glad he’s okay,” Quentin says quietly. He’s still holding the clothes that Tick gave him, she realizes.  
  
“We all are,” she says, “but what I want to know is if you’re okay.”  
  
He shrugs, mouth twisting a little.  
  
“Q, honey,” Margo says, standing up, “I’m not going to leave you here by yourself if you’re still -“  
  
“I’m not,” he sighs, “It’s not that bad. I promise. I’m just. Tired.”  
  
“Okay,” she says, reaches out to touch his shoulder slowly, gently. She hadn’t been there for most of it, for the worst of it, but Julia had filled her in on how things had been. How the Monster had been, with Quentin. _It treated him like a toy_ , Julia had said, _it was always touching him and dragging him around_.  
  
Julia had visited Eliot once in the Brakebills infirmary. He’d been asleep, and she’d barely been able to look at him. Margo didn’t blame her, couldn’t blame her, but it still hurt. _She_ hurt for Eliot, who didn’t deserve this, but who couldn’t do anything to fix it. All they could do was wait and see if time would help heal everyone - assuming they even got the time they needed.  
  
Quentin clearly hadn’t, back on Earth. It’s been a long time since she and Quentin have had more than a few minutes alone together, but she looks at him and knows, with the same certainty she’d had his first year at Brakebills, that he desperately needs some tenderness and love. Like then, she feels strangely willing to give it, unlike then, she knows how. Quentin needs careful handling, light touches. Friends.  
  
“I’ll have someone wake you up for breakfast,” she tells him, “Eliot usually sleeps through it, so it’ll just be us and Fen.”  
  
He nods slowly, replies, “That sounds nice,” so obligatorily that she almost laughs.  
  
“Alright, get some sleep, Coldwater,” she says, squeezing his shoulder and then giving in to the urge to reach up and ruffle his hair. He ducks away from her hand, smiling faintly, and his eyes look a little brighter, a little more like they should, when she leaves the room.  
  
She takes a moment to lean against the wall outside his door and sigh. Tomorrow will bring more problems, some new (the fucking long winter) and some old (her fucking idiot best friends). She’ll handle it, like she always does, but - she needs a good night’s sleep first. And maybe someone to finish what Eliot had started.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can find me on [tumblr](https://leguin.tumblr.com) and [dreamwidth](https://patrokla.dreamwidth.org/) (been posting some fics there that are too short for AO3).
> 
> Next chapter: Reunions and avoidance bingo.


	3. Risk: A Game You'll Never Finish

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Margo, Q, and Fen play a game. Eliot dusts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this one took a while. It's quite long, though, which hopefully makes up for the wait. A few things:
> 
> 1) My great thanks to melthedestroyer for Fen-reading the first draft of this and giving some very helpful advice that resulted in a complete rewrite of the Fen scenes (a rewrite only I've seen, and so any remaining Fen misrepresentation is very much my doing), and to katherinebarlow for arguing in favor of Risk as Castle Whitespire's strategy game of choice. 
> 
> 2) I wrote a couple fics for Queliot Week, including [a Q/Arielle/Eliot fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19302490) cannibalized from the original draft of this chapter, where it wasn't really working. If you're interested in the Mosaic timeline as discussed here, you might be interested in reading it.
> 
> 3) I have changed the chapter count to a tentative five chapters - for better or worse, everyone has too many issues to be resolved in just one final chapter. So! Hopefully, I can keep it to five.
> 
> Okay. Reunion time.

Margo has a guard go and fetch Quentin for breakfast, because she said she would, because she doesn’t want to climb up those stairs again, and because it would be crossing the line from concerned to cloying to be in front of Q’s door a scant six hours after she’d said goodnight to him. She’s confident that he hasn’t done anything too stupid during the night, wouldn’t have given him the room if she wasn’t, but still - there’s a mild sense of relief when he walks into the smaller dining hall. He’s here, alive, and, well. Alive.  
  
He looks rumpled from sleep and a little anxious, shoulders hunched and eyes darting around the room for a moment to confirm that Eliot isn’t there, she thinks. But it’s just her and Fen, as she’d promised, and he relaxes a little as he sits down across from Margo.  
  
“Quentin, High King Fen,” Margo says, jerking her chin over at Fen, who’s seated at the head of the table. “You’ve met.”  
  
“Shit, right,” Quentin says, pushing his chair back and standing uncertainly. “Should I, uh. Should I bow?”  
  
Margo looks over at Fen and raises an eyebrow. She’s been doing her best to make everyone very fucking aware that Fen calls most of the shots these days - not that most of them need it, since Fen is the only person in the country who wears a crown, but. It’s a good reminder for herself, if no one else.  
  
“We’re having breakfast,” Fen says, looking a little horrified at the idea of adding even more formality into her life. “Please, sit down.”  
  
“Right,” Quentin says again. He sits back down, but not before sending Margo a ‘don’t throw me to the sharks like that’ look that she shrugs at.  
  
“Let’s eat!” Fen says brightly, likely preventing an extended and unhelpful exchange of looks between Margo and Quentin about a lot of things unsuited to wordless conversations.  
  
Breakfast in Fillory is usually a quick affair, eggs, bread with jam and cheese and, more recently, American diner-style pancakes that Fen had eaten in New York and become obsessed with. It’s more of a refuel than anything else, storing up carbs for the hours of petitions, diplomatic discussions, infrastructure planning, and construction oversight that make up the days of a Fillorian monarch and her council. On quieter days, breakfast usually turns into a strategy session of some kind, the servants doing their best to unobtrusively clear the table of dishes as Tick covers it with maps and books.  
  
Right now, though, they’re in the kind of winter that myths are made of, and so Whitespire is almost completely devoid of foreign envoys, petitioners, servants, or anyone else whose presence lends structure to Fen and Margo’s days. Margo has ‘grain storage’ and ‘road maintenance’ on her mental list of discussions to continue with Fen and Tick in the afternoon, but the morning belongs to breakfast and the single guest in the castle: Quentin.  
  
“So, Quentin,” Fen says, after a few minutes of them eating (Fen and Margo) and picking (Q) at bowls of thick oatmeal studded with dried berries and nuts, “Tick mentioned that you fell out of the sky into Fillory. Do you know how? Or why?”  
  
“Mmph,” Quentin says, having chosen that exact moment to put a large spoonful of oatmeal in his mouth. His cheeks bulge, and Margo can see the gears spinning in his head, considering whether or not to talk with his mouth full and, thank fuck, deciding against it.  
  
“We’re worried about security, obviously, but this is also pretty unprecedented in terms of ways to enter Fillory from Earth,” Fen continues, clearly also not wanting Quentin to talk right then.  
  
Quentin nods, swallows, then says, “I’ll tell you everything, but it’s a pretty short story. Basically, I walked out the front door of the - the hospital, and suddenly I was falling through the air and into a very cold pond. That’s it.”  
  
“No clocks, buttons, spells?” Margo presses. “Sheep?”  
  
“Uh, no,” Quentin says. “None of those things. I wasn’t thinking of Fillory or anything, either.”  
  
“What were you thinking of?” Fen asks shrewdly, and Quentin’s shoulders stiffen.  
  
“…normal things,” Quentin says, which Margo takes to mean ‘depressing things, and also Eliot.’ She hopes they aren’t one and the same, right now.  
  
He’s nervous, she realizes, like she hasn’t seen him in a long time. Even with the Monster - he’d been tense, but it’d had a different quality to it. And before the Monster, there’d been an instant where it seemed like he’d settled, somehow, in between one breath and the next. But here he is, dropping uhs and ums into every sentence, and looking like someone will smack him if he talks too long or reveals too much. He must’ve been too tired to do it last night, recovering from unexpected interplanetary travel and nascent hypothermia, but it’s all out in full force now. Margo wants a fucking drink, just thinking about how to defuse this particular Quentin-shaped bomb, and it’s not even her job to do. He has to talk to Eliot.  
  
Sending him to Eliot in this state would be courting disaster, though, so she finishes her oatmeal and says, “Let’s go to the library,” and then belatedly looks at Fen, who is smiling at her, Fenishly.  
  
“’kay,” Quentin says, and this time he does have his mouth full, and he’s fragile and healing and whatever, but he’s also still a bit of a shithead, so she kicks him under the table and feels almost no remorse.  
  
—  
   
Eliot wakes up slow slow slow, like an alligator rising through Mississippi River mud. There’s no quick transition from sleep to wake these days for him; he spends what feels like hours every morning slowly becoming more aware that the memories of the Mosaic life he’s revisiting are just a dream, until the realization is so obvious he has to wake up or commit to sleeping the day away. The difference between dream-memories and reality are razor thin some days, but not today - for one, he hadn’t had a hangover in the dream.  
  
Eliot blames his pounding headache on the Lorian whiskey, the Fillorian wine, and, somewhere near the bottom of the list, himself. Somewhere near the top of the list is the Monster, who’d gone completely rogue with alcohol and drug consumption during the months it’d had control of Eliot’s body, to the point that staying pleasantly tipsy for a few hours is guaranteed to fuck him over the next day.  
  
(Drugs had been another problem entirely. Getting control of his body while in the midst of some kind of withdrawal, and having to deal with that on top of the gut wound and the memories and the way he wanted to claw his own skin off just to look like someone who hadn’t hurt everyone he cared about? Not recommended. Eliot suspects one of the reasons Lipson had suggested Fillory for his recovery was the lack of cocaine on the entire planet.)  
  
Thankfully, whatever else magicians had utterly failed to do in the thousands of years they’d been fucking around with spellwork, they’d perfected hangover cure spells. There are probably three in every living language and two in every dead one - alcohol abuse really is a universal human habit. Eliot runs through a favorite, a simple Sumerian spell that only consists of a modified Popper 22 going into Popper 14 and doesn’t need much adjustment for the Circumstances of Fillory’s whole opium-in-the-air deal. It leaves his eyes feeling filmy and his skin itchy for a few minutes, but he’d take that any day over the headache slowly loosening its grip from around his skull.  
  
He heats a basin of water with another quick tut and washes his face, and tries to prepare himself to think about seeing Quentin. Quentin, who does not want to see him, still. Quentin, who is somewhere in the castle, maybe curled up in a window seat trying to look through the impenetrable curtain of falling snow. Maybe sitting in Whitespire’s library, doing his best to figure out how to leave.  
  
Margo wouldn’t - she wouldn’t let him leave without telling Eliot, right? He doesn’t think so, but he’s painfully aware how much he doesn’t know about Quentin right now, or for the last year. Maybe she thinks that Q is just like everyone else, in desperate need of time and space away from Eliot’s body. Maybe-  
  
He’s spiraling. He needs to get dressed, he needs some of the horrible instant coffee Margo had brought back, and he needs to talk to Margo. And then, hopefully, Quentin.  
  
Fuck, he really would like to talk to Quentin. He’d love, and it feels pathetically joyful to admit it, to just see him, to confirm the fact of him. To make a new memory.  
  
Last night’s dream has reminded him how little time they spent apart in Fillory Before. Never more than a week away from each other, he thinks, and even that week had been unintentional. Q had taken Teddy to Arielle’s parents’ farm to stay with them and then fractured his ankle and ended up bedridden. Eliot had spent a few long, long days in the empty cottage, putting together elaborate and useless Mosaic patterns and drinking heavily, and then he’d gotten a message from Arielle’s parents via a wolfhound messenger with the news. He’d traveled to Tarybrook and traded spellwork for the use of a wagon and two donkeys, and then he’d gone to bring Quentin home. And for forty more years, that had been it. And then Eliot had died. And then, after somehow getting another chance to stay by Quentin’s side all over again, Eliot had ruined everything.  
  
A third chance seems improbable, given Quentin’s current avoidance of him, but Eliot doesn’t need that. He doesn’t expect it. He’ll take what he can get, for as long as he can get it, which is all he’d ever really had, anyway.   
  
(He wants that chance. He can still feel the sure touch of Quentin’s hands on him in another life, and he _wants_ -)  
  
—  
  
“The game is Risk,” Margo declares, ignoring Quentin’s muttered “Really?” as she gets the box from the shelf in the library that’s been appropriated for board games.  
  
“Oh, I like that one,” Fen says.  
  
“You do?” he asks, sounding incredulous as he settles on the floor, cross-legged.  
  
“It’s very straightforward,” Fen tells him, “And I like the names on the map.”  
  
“I like them too,” Quentin admits. “Especially Ir-“  
  
“Irkutsk!” Fen finishes enthusiastically, and that startles a tiny smile out of Q.  
  
Margo is smiling a little as well as she watches them, two of her favorite people taking the lids off of the little containers that the Risk pieces come in. She can already tell that this particular plan will work, which means it’s time to set the next one into motion.  
  
“I’ll be right back,” she announces, “Two things: one, I’m blue. Two, don’t make any alliances while I’m gone.”  
  
“We wouldn’t make alliances before determining the order of play,” Quentin says, scandalized, and Margo tosses back “I’ve seen stupider moves, Coldwater,” as she leaves the library.  
  
The room goes quiet and cold with her absence. Fen lets it settle, and watches Quentin watch her.  
  
“Do you. Um. I think this is the first time we’ve ever been in a room alone together,” he says, mouth twisting into an awkward smile.  
  
“Probably,” she replies, after it becomes clear that he has nothing else to add. “You haven’t spent very much time in Fillory.”  
  
The smile stops twisting and freezes at her remark, and Quentin’s eyes above it are dull like stones from a dry streambed. She doesn’t know him, not really, only knows the versions of him from Eliot and Margo’s drunken reminisces and worried strategizing. But she knows the feeling of going away. Quentin, for a long moment, seems to be gone.  
  
Then he shifts, shoulders curling in, hands grasping his elbows, and his eyes are dark and flat, but no longer dull.  
  
“Eliot never told you,” he concludes.  
  
“Eliot never told me a lot of things,” she says, and she can hear the tension in her tone, but she can’t bring herself to smooth it out. When it comes to Eliot, she’s full of bitterness first, love a close second. Pity is a distant third. They will always be family, and she will always be the woman he was forced to marry, and he will always be the man she was raised to marry.  
  
Losing Eliot - or believing he had been lost, had gone a long way towards siphoning off that bitterness. She’d mourned him, fulfilled her wifely duties to the last, and then she’d looked forward to the future. A future of her own making, this time. A future with someone of her own choosing, this time.  
  
Eliot’s return to Whitespire has made that more difficult than she’d expected.  
  
But Quentin has little to do with that, and only slightly more to do with Eliot and Fen’s marriage, and so she unfolds the Risk board and tries for something more gentle.  
  
“You could tell me, if you wanted to.”  
  
“It’s a long story,” Quentin murmurs, looking at the little pile of red pieces that he’s dumped onto the floor. “And there’s a lot of it I don’t remember anymore. I guess the short version is that Eliot and I went on a quest together, before -” he looks up and gestures with a hand at the room around them, finally settles on, “when magic was gone. We ended up spending awhile in Fillory.”  
  
_Together_ , Fen thinks, is a key word there, but she doesn’t think she’ll get anything clearer from Quentin, not with the way he’s fiddling nervously with the game pieces.  
  
“Margo and I went on a quest together,” she offers, and Quentin looks up at that.  
  
“Oh, like,” he pauses, then, “together?”  
  
She smiles.  
  
“Well, it was my quest, but Margo followed me and insisted on coming. She said she was my ‘wing woman,’” Fen says, making air quotes like Josh likes to do.  
  
Quentin huffs a laugh at that, and she takes it as encouragement to continue. She hasn’t really gotten to tell this story, not since Margo’s gotten back. Not since the story stopped ending in ‘and I’ll never see her again.’  
  
It’s not a long story, not as long as she guesses Quentin’s is, but she embellishes a little. She even makes Quentin laugh properly, just once, when she describes Margo shoving the prophet into a briar patch. It’s a good story now that it has a better ending. Both of them are smiling by the time Fen decides to bring it to a close, with Margo’s return to Fillory. She’d lifted the banishment by herself, but they’d done a formal un-banishing anyway. She keeps it vague, then, doesn’t say how she’d held Margo’s hands and rubbed a salve across her brands that would erase them, in time.  Doesn’t mention how Margo had smelled like scented oil and pine sap, how Fen had seen flashes of relief and joy in her face at odd moments, crashing across it like lightning. She just gives it the kind of ending her father would use when he knew she’d fall asleep before the story came to a proper end, says, “And what comes next only the birds know, so we’ll have to wait for them to tell us.”  
  
Quentin’s breath catches at that, and his smile goes crooked. He’s no longer clutching his arms, and Fen thinks - she doesn’t know, exactly what had happened to Quentin before, or what he and Eliot had had. She hasn’t asked Margo to tell her, isn’t sure if she would, really, but she thinks about _together_ and decides to try something.  
  
“You know,” she starts, “I was a little mad at first, when I realized Margo was following me. I thought she didn’t trust me, or didn’t think I knew how to take care of myself even though I’m a knifemaker’s daughter. But I would’ve spent days doing chores for that witch before I realized it was a trick, and I never would’ve gotten the truth. I wouldn’t have been able to finish it, without Margo, and she couldn’t have started it without me. We needed each other.”  
  
Fen has to cut herself off there, feeling almost like she’s revealed too much of Margo to Quentin, that she’s come too close to saying out loud what Margo has only said with actions: that she cares for Fen, and deeply, as her caring (for the few people included in it) is wont to be.  
  
Quentin seems to hear it anyway. He uncurls a little more, and looks at her with only a little hesitancy.  
  
“Hey so, you don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to,” he says, “It’s just that I’ve been sort of out of the loop, so I was wondering. Um. Are you and Margo…?”  
  
He trails off there, and then Fen is stuck with the wide open space of his question.  
  
There’s an easy answer to be made: no. But there’s a hopeful amendment, as well: not yet. Unspoken, although she knows he’s heard it: I want us to be.  
  
In the end, she goes with the second option, and Quentin looks at her for a long moment, evaluating.  
  
“Good luck,” he says, finally, one of those Earth sayings that she’s rarely heard in a positive way. But he sounds sincere, and she likes the idea that someone else would see her and Margo as something to be hoped for.  
  
“Thank you,” she tells him, returning the sincerity.  
  
Then she grabs the blue pieces, the ones Margo had claimed, and nudges him into taking the red ones. They’ve waited long enough to start playing.  
  
—  
  
Margo is still smiling as she heads down the hall and promptly runs into Eliot.  
  
“El! Just the person I was looking for.”  
  
“And you’re just who I was looking for,” he returns, “Where the hell is everyone else? I had to try seven different rooms in the main wing before I found Tick, and I haven’t seen a single servant.”  
  
“Fen sent most of them home with a bonus and supplies from the castle’s larder,” Margo shrugs, “Most of them have families they’d rather spend the next few months with than stay here.”  
  
“Fair enough,” Eliot says. “So…”  
  
“Quentin?” she asks, and he gives her a pained smile.  
  
“Who else?” he says, leaning against the wall gingerly and then springing away with a curse. “That’s fucking cold.”  
  
“Well we’re not about to heat the halls, El, there’s a million of them,” Margo says, “Just be glad we’re only a day in, in a few weeks you won’t want to leave your bedroom.”  
  
“Well, at least I have that to look forward to,” Eliot mutters, looking like he’s about to try leaning against the wall again.  
  
She takes him by the elbow and leads him down the hall a ways, to a bench in an alcove, and he sits down with a barely audible grunt of pain.  
  
“Lipson said -“  
  
“Don’t talk to me about the fucking cane, Margo,” Eliot snaps, “How is Quentin? That’s the whole fucking -“  
  
She doesn’t say anything, just raises her eyebrows at him.  
  
“Sorry,” he says after a moment. “That was - undeserved.”  
  
He leans back against the wall, this one thankfully covered by a hideous tapestry depicting what looks like a black bear and a giant snake fighting, or possibly fucking, and drags a hand over his face.  
  
“You know what’s funny? I thought getting out would be the hard part. Like a quest. After a certain point, it’s all smooth sailing. And instead I’m -“ he pauses, and she sits down next to him and puts a forgiving hand in his.  
  
Their fingers twine together, a nest of pale pink and brown, and he stares at them for a moment before continuing.  
  
“Instead, everything is broken. And I keep having these dreams-”  
  
“What dreams?” she asks, not bothering to keep the alarm out of her voice. Lipson had said it was all Eliot in there, 100%, but if she was wrong, well. Margo keeps her axes pretty fucking sharp.  
  
“It’s nothing bad,” Eliot says quickly. “Nothing about the Monster, I promise. Just the Mosaic, usually. The life Q and I had there.”  
  
He stops again, but she knows to wait. He’s mentioned the Mosaic quest in fits and spurts; she knows just enough to know that he and Quentin had created a bond there she would’ve been terrifyingly jealous of when she was younger and Eliot was all she had. Just enough to know now that Eliot feels like he’s lost a part of himself, without Quentin there.  
  
“We had a Long Winter, back then,” he continues, “that’s how I knew about it. We were pretty much snowed in for months, which our son hated, but we were - God, we were so fucking grown up and we were just happy for the break from the Mosaic. I was happy for the break. The thing is. The thing is, Bambi, those years were the happiest I’ve ever been in my life. And I keep dreaming about them, remembering them, all the time, and I keep seeing how everything was so broken there, too. _I_ was broken. I couldn’t even get the courage up to - but that was as good as it’s ever going to get, I think. I think that was it, for me.”  
  
He’s almost whispering by the end, staring at the bare stone wall across from them and clutching Margo’s hand tightly. She leans her head against his arm and doesn’t say anything, just lets him shudder out a few breaths into the silence.  
  
“Jesus, El,” she sighs, and he lets out a huff of slightly wet laughter in response. “I wish I’d been there. I think you could use another witness.”  
  
“I wish you’d been there too,” he murmurs, “I always wished that. I missed you so much. I came back missing you, and then everything with the Monster happened and I missed you even more.”  
  
“I missed you too,” she admits, shutting her eyes and remembering the fucking Fillorian mourning rites, the ritual wailing, all the things she couldn’t let herself do or feel because they would’ve overwhelmed her completely. “There was a really long, shitty time where it seemed like we wouldn’t be able to get you back, and it was just me and Quentin trying to save you however we could, from Fillory and Earth. I kept thinking that I’d know if you were really gone, that I’d feel it somehow, but then I thought maybe I was feeling it, and-“  
  
She has to stop talking because she’s, Jesus, she’s crying into the sleeve of his jacket, which is not something she’d come out here to do, but here she is, weeping in the halls of her former castle. Thank fuck no one else is here to see it.  
  
“Bambi,” Eliot says softly, and he’s twisting in her grasp, turning towards her and enfolding her in his arms. It must be a horrible position for his wound, but she ignores that for a second, selfishly wanting all of this from Eliot, the solidity of his body and his tight embrace. One of his hands cups the back of her head and his thumb strokes soothingly across her neck. “Bambi,” he murmurs over and over, “My Bambi.”  
  
Eventually the well runs dry, and she draws back from his chest and observes the large damp spot she’d left behind with a kind of satisfaction.  
  
“I think I needed that,” she says, looking up at Eliot.  
  
“I think I did too,” he says, and she realizes that his cheeks are wet. “You can ruin my jackets anytime, you know. Although if I’m wearing silk I may try and redirect you towards a pillow.”  
  
She snorts at that and disentangles herself so she can wipe at the mess on her own face.  
  
“I’ll keep that in mind.”  
  
They take a moment to gather themselves. The last thing Margo wants is to go back into the library and have Fen ask her questions and Furrow Her Brow In Concern. Or maybe it isn’t the last thing, but it would derail Margo’s other plans. Speaking of:  
  
“So, Q,” she says, turning back to Eliot. “Honestly, El, there’s a lot going on that I know about, and a lot that I don’t. He’s been worse, but -“ she hesitates, thinking about him with the Monster. About the worst she’s ever seen him, after Alice died. “Not much worse,” she decides. “I think he needs to see you, and you need to see him. But I don’t think that you marching into the library is the best way to go about it.”  
  
Eliot sighs, but he doesn’t seem surprised.  
  
“Could you ask him?” he asks. “Or just tell him that I’m here, if he wants to see me.”  
  
“Only if you’re not going to be literally here. Ambushing the guy in a hallway is not a smooth move, El.”  
  
“I wasn’t going to ambush him,” Eliot protests, looking marginally more hopeful than he had when he’d first come down the hall. “How about the armory? The empty one.”  
  
“Alright,” Margo says dubiously, “But you’ll have to find some way to heat it, there’s no fireplace in there. Can you make it down there on your own?”  
  
“Yes!” Eliot says, and then a second later, “But it might take me a few minutes. Maybe wait a bit before you tell him.”  
  
“Works for me. I’ll annihilate him in Risk and then I’ll tell him.”  
  
“I already owe you the world,” Eliot begins, and she waves him off.  
  
“It’s no fun if you keep track of that shit,” she says, and then, just for good measure, “I love you. But listen, El...he might not come.”  
  
“If he doesn’t come, then I’ll read a book and see you at dinner,” Eliot says lightly.  
  
“And if he does?”  
  
“Then I’ll see you at dinner,” Eliot says. “I’m not expecting him to - I just want to see how he is, Margo. Anything else is up to him. And I really don’t think there will be anything else.”  
  
“You’re allowed to hope,” Margo tells him, leaning up to kiss him on his stubbly cheek. “Everyone is.”  
  
Eliot gives her a half-smile that says he doesn’t believe her, not really, then heads back down the hall. She lets out a sigh once he’s out of sight, swipes at her eyes one more time, and then goes back to the library.  
  
She finds Fen and Quentin in the middle of a game (“Fen got tired of waiting,” Q says, looking at her like that’s supposed to mean something), because they’re both traitors. She’s tempted to start the whole thing over, but instead she waits until Q has successfully wrested all of Australia and made inroads into Asia via Siam from Fen before suggesting that he let her play for awhile.  
  
“What, you just happened to want to play once I had one of the two most defensible territories?”  
  
“Sure did,” she says. “Now, you can stick around while Fen and I battle it out, or…you can get your shit together and go see Eliot in the armory.”  
  
His shoulders tighten at the mention of Eliot, but not too much. He still looks a little looser, a little calmer than he had at breakfast.  
  
“You don’t have to,” she tells him, “but he wants you to know that he’s there if you want to see him.”  
  
Quentin is silent and still for a moment, and Margo looks at Fen to see her giving him the Furrowed Brow of Concern. Success.  
  
“Okay,” he finally says, clambering up off of the floor, “I’ll go see him. I’d say have fun conquering the world, but Fen is pretty good.”  
  
“Fen is great,” Margo says, suddenly impatient to have a few hours away from this whole mess. “Now go, go.”  
  
She gives him a gentle push out of the door, literally, and Fen calls “Good luck!” right before the door closes.  
  
“Alright, let’s see what you’ve got,” Margo drawls, turning back to Fen.  
  
Fen gives her a crinkly-eyed smile as she sits down, and goes to place her reinforcement armies. She doesn’t attack any of Margo’s territories immediately, just moves her pieces around in a way that makes Margo think she’s about to launch a doomed campaign to get Siam back.  
  
Just as Margo is about to tell her to stop waffling around and hand over the damn dice, Fen looks up, bites her lip, and says, apropos of nothing, “What about an alliance?”  
  
“There’s only two of us,” Margo says. “We’re supposed to be enemies, that’s the whole point of the game.”  
  
“I know that,” Fen says, rolling her eyes at Margo. “There are other ways to be allies.”  
  
Margo leans back from where she’s been hunched over the board and narrows her eyes at Fen for a moment, scrutinizing her. Fen is smiling at her again, and -  
  
Oh. Oh!  
  
“Fen, you little minx,” Margo says, delighted, and then, “Fuck. We can’t. You’re High King, we can’t just -“  
  
“We can,” Fen says quickly, “We absolutely can. I’m not married anymore, and even if I was, I’m allowed a wife now as well.”  
  
Margo is tempted. She’s very tempted. And ordinarily, the opportunity to mess around with Fen while they’re snowed in for a few months would be a Canadian shack fantasy come true. But:  
  
“Fen, I don’t think this is a good way to establish your authority as a High King who’s completely independent from me,” she says. “You know half of the barons think I’m your puppeteer, and this would _not_ help that situation.”  
  
“I do know that, actually,” Fen says, a thread of annoyance in her voice, “Tick briefs me on more than he briefs you, which I guess is a sign that I’ve successfully ‘established my authority’ with him, even if I’ve failed with everyone else.”  
  
“Fen, I didn’t mean that -“  
  
“Right, you just meant that I can’t be trusted to figure out the best way to rule on my own. How fortunate that I have such a skilled advisor,” Fen snaps.  
  
She stands up, jaw and mouth all tight lines of anger.  
  
“Thank you for your advice,” she says, and then she leaves the room.  
  
Margo looks down at the Risk board. Fen had used the blue pieces, _her_ blue pieces. They cover half of South America and a good portion of Asia and Africa. There’s a single lone blue piece sitting on Greenland as well, Margo’s red pieces surrounding it.  
  
“Fuck,” she mutters into the empty room, pressing her hands against her forehead. “Fuck.”  
  
She almost wishes Quentin, Eliot, and their one million problems were back so she could think about anything else. She’d take another crying jag over this, the overwhelming sensation that she’s fucked up something that was still shiny and promising, so recently discovered.  
  
Fuck.  
  
—  
  
The armory looks like it had the last time Eliot had spent any time in it: empty, dusty, and strangely lonely. A room stripped of all its purpose, identifiable only from the empty display hooks and the memory of its use. If no one ever filled it again, eventually that memory would fade, and it would become something else entirely. What a terribly subtle metaphor for a solid half of his current predicaments.  
  
He ends up dusting the place, the cleaning spells comfortingly repetitive and easy, so easy that he sinks briefly into the memory of his first day in the castle when Quentin had hugged him and he’d tried to prepare himself to never see his friends again. When he emerges, the room is almost clean, if still in disarray. The outlines of the swords and shield are, despite the spellwork, still clinging stubbornly to the walls. It’s a job for another day, maybe, or maybe not.  
  
Eventually, room and mind as clear as one could reasonably hope for, there’s nothing to do but wait. He casts a minor heating spell that takes the chill out of the air and handily provides a warm amber light as well, and uses it to pick through the few books left in the room.  
  
“Ser Cinderwald’s Strange and Exotic Adventures,” he says, looking at the front of a slim, wide volume. “And what might those adventures be, I wonder.”  
  
“He seduces a sea lion,” says a familiar voice. “A whole group of them, actually. It’s…very graphic.”  
  
Eliot drops the book immediately, lets it fall away to somewhere, the ground, maybe, who could possibly care right now? Quentin is standing in the doorway.  
  
“Q,” he breathes, quips and lines completely forgotten. Quentin looks exhausted and scruffy, his hair short and flat, the Fillorian-style wrap shirt he’s wearing almost hanging off of him. Eliot itches to touch him, to hold him, to maybe cast Hawkin’s Grooming Spell, to run his fingers through his hair and then ask him to grow it back out.  
  
Instead, he stays where he is, by the bookshelf, and watches Quentin.  
  
“How are you?” he asks, after it becomes clear that Quentin is not going to talk first.  
  
“Can’t complain,” Q says, and Eliot thinks he sees his mouth twitch a little. “How are you?”  
  
“Better,” Eliot says, in what has to be the understatement of the year, then throws caution to the wind and adds, “Especially now that I’ve seen you.”  
  
“You’ve seen me,” Quentin agrees. His fingers raise a little in the most halfhearted jazz hands Eliot has ever witnessed.  
  
“I’ve seen you,” Eliot echoes. They look at each other. Quentin’s expression is impenetrably flat, Eliot feeling his emotions bleeding out all over his face. It’s humiliating; he only barely cares.  
  
“So, sea lions,” he says in desperation, “that’s what you’re into these days?”  
  
Somehow it’s exactly the wrong thing to say. He’d thought Quentin was inaccessible before, but he watches him close off completely like a door slamming shut, leaving him in the dark.  
  
“Well, I had time to kill,” Quentin says, folding his arms in front of his stomach. “I was a palace guard, at the time. Got assigned here for a day.”  
  
“Right,” Eliot replies faintly, the words sending him back to that unbearably hot summer day in the fairy-proof corridor, the way his hands had darted familiarly across Quentin’s uniform, instincts from the Mosaic still creating impulses in his mind. Quentin’s attempt to hide the way his whole face had fallen after Eliot had refused to go on the boat quest, the smell of sweat and a faintly spicy cologne surrounding him as he’d held Quentin and pressed a kiss against his forehead. He thought he’d been trying so hard to be a friend, and only a friend. But he hadn’t known how to be that to Quentin even a little, not anymore.  
  
“Eliot!” Quentin says, insistent like it’s not the first time he’s said it, and Eliot comes back to the present with a jerk.  
  
“I’m fine,” he says belatedly, and Quentin’s face is readable now. He’s worried.  
  
“Really,” Eliot tries again, “I’m fine. I - you must have things to do. Finding a way to get back and all that.”  
  
Quentin just looks at him, finally giving a noncommittal _mmm_ in response. Eliot can see his hands clutching at the loose fabric of his shirt.  
  
Christ. He doesn’t know what to do, he honestly has no idea. He thought maybe he’d have an idea of what Q wanted once he saw him, but he feels like he knows less than before. His gut is starting to hurt again, that ache of overexertion, which includes just about any exertion, these days.  
  
“Do you want to keep talking?” he asks, voice clipped by the pain and by the uncertainty winding its way through his head.  
  
Quentin keeps looking at him, and finally shakes his head.  
  
“Not right now,” he tells him, which Eliot supposes is better than a flat no. “I’ll see you at dinner?”  
  
“Sure,” Eliot says, and Quentin’s gone by the time he’s gotten the full word out.  
  
And then Eliot’s alone in the armory again. He stumbles over to the dais and slowly slides down until he’s sitting on the floor, slumped against it. He’s only been awake for a few hours, if that, but he feels exhausted. The thought of seeing Quentin at dinner exhausts him further. He feels wrung out and strung out on nerves. All those questions he didn’t get an answer to. All the questions he never even asked. _Why didn’t you want to see me? Can you ever forgive me?_ Will _you ever forgive me? Do you still l-_  
  
He forces himself back up, desperate to stop that train of thought. That way madness lies, he thinks, as though he hadn’t found madness miles back. He makes his agonizingly slow way back to his room, clinging to the walls on occasion, grateful that no one is around to see. He tries to bolster himself with the thought that Quentin is, if nothing else, alive. It’s all that really matters, isn’t it?  
  
_Anything else is a bonus_ , he tells himself. _Anything else he lets you have is a bonus_. It becomes a mantra as he winds his way through the halls, until he collapses in the chair by his window and leans his head back to look at the snow falling out of a troubled gray sky. In a snowstorm, the view out of every window looks the same. If he directs his gaze outward and ignores the stonework of the window frame, he could be somewhere else, decades in the past. Teddy lying on the rug in front of the fire with a book, Quentin kneading bread dough just a few feet away. Eliot, surrounded by love and still wanting it more, wanting it different. Wanting.  
  
He draws his mind back and focuses on the throbbing pain of his overworked body. Lets the words escape into the empty room, as though hearing them will make them seem more satisfying.  
  
“Anything else is a bonus.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter: Eliot misunderstands. Fen talks to an unlikely friend.


	4. Herrold's Relocation and Other Patented Spells

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Quentin and Eliot have a long-awaited discussion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this has obviously been a long time coming, and also quite a long time in the making! The reasons for that involve work, my tendency towards writing slowly, my tendency towards rewriting scenes over and over again, and my indecision about what this chapter was actually meant to do. 
> 
> A few notes, before the chapter:
> 
> 1) **Content Warning** for extended discussions of suicidality, mental hospitals, and depression. Nothing more serious than canon, but it is a focal point of the chapter, and of Quentin's arc in this fic.
> 
> 2) This chapter would be much less than it is if not for the help of melthedestroyer, who helped me figure out what exactly I was doing (twice), edited, and suggested some vital scene reorganizations. My sincere thanks!
> 
> 3) I recently posted [a short fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20214181) about Quentin and Eliot at the Mosaic that was originally written for this chapter. I consider it canonical, and might reference it later on, but it didn't quite fit the themes of this chapter. Readers of that short might recognize the lede for the memory, which I've also used here.
> 
> 4) I've decided to conclude the story with 5 chapters, as previously stated. Unfortunately, there's a lot I don't feel I can do justice in this chapter and the next, final one. So my plan is to get everything to a satisfying (but not too satisfying point) at the end of chapter 5, and pick things up again with a sequel towards the end of the year, once I've finished my MHHE fic. I promise that there will be resolutions, including in this very chapter, but things will fall much closer to 'hopeful ending' than 'happy ending.' 
> 
> I have a lot that I want to write about in this fic universe, from Fillorian politicking and the mystery of how Quentin got to Fillory to the impact of an extended, massive snowstorm on Fillory's very questionable infrastructure, and most importantly, the development of Quention and Eliot's relationship, and Fen and Margo's. I've really appreciated the reception this story has gotten, and I hope no one is turned off of it because things won't be tied up as neatly as I'd hoped.
> 
> And now the chapter!

Fen doesn’t go to dinner. It’s childish of her not to go, she knows, and she’s embarrassed by herself as she sits in her room and watches the clock tick steadily towards midnight.

It’s just that she hasn’t felt so humiliated by Margo in years, maybe not since the first days they spent together in Whitespire, when it became clear that Fen was completely extraneous to Eliot’s life, and Margo absolutely fundamental. It’s not even the rejection that makes her flush and clench her jaw when she recalls the moment, but the _reason_ she’d been rejected. The way Margo had assumed that she hadn’t thought it out, that she was just a silly girl proposing a dalliance with no thought to the consequences. It’s the way that Margo, for all of her deliberate deference to Fen, clearly still sees her as a naive knifemaker’s daughter.

It cuts deeply, she won’t pretend it doesn’t. And her hurt would’ve only been compounded by sitting at a table with Eliot and Quentin and pretending that everything was okay. It isn’t. So she stays in her room, and sharpens the knives she keeps by her bed, and listens to the near-silent snowfall and the crackling fire.

Eventually she gets hungry. She’d skipped lunch, somewhere in the afternoon, and now dinner, and with the servants gone she can’t just request a meal. But she’d learned the ins and outs of the castle during her first year here, when no one thought to stop her and she had nothing else to do, and so she makes her way to the pantry on the first floor via an unobtrusive passage around the corner from her room.

There’s no real need for the secrecy; it’s close to nine, and Margo has likely retired to her bedchamber to drink with Eliot, and talk, and - whatever else they might do in these endless nights. Fen knows they’ve slept together before, and suspects they’re sleeping together again. Or they were, until Quentin appeared. He’s an uncertain factor, to all of them, she thinks. A complicating factor.

She feels a sympathetic pang at that. Margo’s clearly been managing him, and it’s all done out of love, but Fen knows how well that kind of treatment can chafe. Then again, maybe Quentin doesn’t mind. Or isn’t able to, right now.

The pantry is a seemingly endless space, very cool and dimly lit. She could make it brighter if she wanted to; Whitespire’s lighting system is run by magic - not the kind people study, just the kind of magic anyone can reach out and push or pull if they know it’s there. But something about the still dark that settles her, so she leaves it alone. She doesn’t need the lights to find what she came here to grab, anyway: dried mango, from Earth. Josh had brought some with him, and she’s gotten a taste for it. It’s good food for contemplating things, sweet and leathery, and easy to carry.

She walks in dusky light past three rows of shelves, then takes a right into a completely dark row and reaches out blindly, fingers searching for the strange feeling of the plastic packaging, and -

\- and shrieks when she encounters something warm.

Something living. Slightly damp and furry, and alive, and she scrabbles for the magic that’ll bring the lights up until the thing says, “Hello, your Majesty,” and Fen recognizes its high, hoarse voice immediately.

“Abigail!” she says, relieved, “I didn’t know that you - I thought you have your own rooms? Down in the cellar?”

 _With Rafe_ , she doesn’t add, because they haven’t formally announced their partnership, and so assuming it aloud would be dreadfully impolite. 

“I do,” Abigail says. Fen is beginning to make out her bright black eyes in the dark, and her long curving limbs. She’s hanging, it appears, from the railing of the top shelf. Like all of Abigail’s poses, it looks terribly uncomfortable.

“And yet you’re here,” Fen says after a moment, when it becomes clear that Abigail isn’t simply pausing, but rather considers the matter closed. “May I ask why?”

“Always so polite,” Abigail wheezes. “It’s very straightforward.”

Fen wonders if it would be rude to keep searching for the mango while she waits for Abigail to explain. Probably.

“My dearheart has gone to visit family over this Long Winter,” Abigail finally continues. “But I require certain environments. Meals. And the servants were sent away,” this is said in a rather baleful tone, “so. Here I am.”

“My apologies, Abigail, I didn’t mean to deprive you of your necessities,” Fen says carefully. She really is apologetic - offending the council representative of the talking animals would, unlike sleeping with Margo, have serious political repercussions.

Abigail snuffles and hums in what Fen thinks is the equivalent of a shrug. “I enjoy the quiet,” she says. “And the fruit.”

“Fruit?” Fen asks, heart sinking.

“Very sweet and dry,” Abigail says. “But a terrible rind.”

Fen resists the urge to sigh, smiles instead and says as brightly as she can, “Mm, that sounds good. Could I try some?”

“No,” Abigail says. “I don’t think so.”

Of course. For a moment, Fen begins to think, petulantly, _I am the High King_ , but she rejects the thought before she’s even finished thinking it; entitlement doesn’t have to be metaphorical. _Get it together_ , she tells herself.

“Your Majesty,” Abigail says, and then, after a moment Fen knows to wait for, “winter is a lonely time.”

“Yes,” Fen replies, slightly surprised by the statement, and ashamed of her own surprise. “It can be. I’m sorry that it’s lonely for you.”

“Sloths can wait. We are patient,” Abigail tells her. “Humans, less so.”

She goes quiet again, and Fen hears the slow scratch of claws on metal as she shifts. The mango is a lost cause; she should find something else and go back to her room. What else in the pantry is good?

“You are waiting for someone,” Abigail observes, and Fen feels herself blushing in the darkness.

“I was.”

“Some things are worth waiting for,” Abigail tells her. “Love. Revenge. Sweet fruits.”

With that, she shifts again, and this time Fen can just barely see a piece of mango sticking out of her mouth. Sweet fruits, indeed.

The silence that follows gets long enough that it’s clearly a dismissal. Fen shifts from one foot to the other, then says, “Thank you for your advice,” and leaves before Abigail can wheeze out a farewell. Fen doubts she would’ve, anyway.

She grabs two things at random as she goes, a jar of something purple and jammy, and a small sack that she’s hoping will have nuts, or sweets. As she goes back to her rooms, she passes the kitchen and sees warm firelight pouring out from under the door. She pauses for a moment, considering trying her luck with whatever might’ve been left out in there, and then hears Eliot quite clearly through the door, say, “You saved me. I’m here, Q. I’m right here.”

Well. She backs away from whatever terribly personal conversation is unfolding in there, and heads upstairs.

\--

Eliot valiantly resists the urge to drink before dinner. It’s easy; he’s tired of being unbearably fucking hungover. It’s hard; his body aches like it hasn’t since he lived with someone willing to beat the shit out of him whenever provoked by his existence. He lets his forehead fall against the cool glass of the windowpane and doesn’t allow himself to think about anything other than the feeling of the glass as it warms slightly, and the way his breath condenses against it like a bird, impacting.

Margo had said that the castle would get colder, and he fancies he can feel the chill settling in. It’s a serious oversight in the castle’s construction, the way it retains so little heat. Although it might just be the Long Winter. Now that he thinks on it, he’s never wintered in Whitespire for a full season. He’d spent most of a summer here, during the fairy occupation, but that had been so completely interrupted by the Mosaic that it’s impossible for him to consider the time as anything cohesive. How could it be, when he’d spent fifty years in Fillory in a single day?

 _Fifty years_. Even as he thinks it, he tries to take it back, the memory swooping down to carry him away, but it’s too late. Fifty years…

-

The throne room is thick with the scent of incense, blood, and flowers, but Eliot registers the cloying smell only distantly as he sits on the stone steps. 

Much stronger is the scent of peaches and growing things, dirt and new life and the rosemary he’d grown in pots on the windowsill and the bread Quentin made every week with Teddy and the flowers in Arielle’s hair on her wedding day and the crickets filling the clearing with sound every summer night and the way Teddy had wailed for six months straight after being born and the deep circles under Quentin’s eyes after Arielle had died and the warmth of Quentin’s body lying against his and the warmth of Arielle’s body lying against his and the terrifyingly slight weight of Teddy when he held him for the first time and the way every inch of him lit up when Quentin leaned forward and kissed him and the way every inch of him lit up when Quentin brushed a hand against his while reaching for a tile and the ache in his knees when he kneeled down on the Mosaic and the way his hands withered and shook and the last sunrise he’d ever seen and the feeling of Quentin’s hand in his as they watched it together and the sharpness of skin over bone with nothing left in between and falling asleep watching Quentin, and falling, and falling -

“Fifty years,” Quentin says, looking at him with something too awed to be disbelief.

“It happened,” he breathes, and his relief that it’s not just him remembering all of this is quickly eclipsed by a feeling that reverberates through him when he looks at Quentin. Love, love that makes him sick with its breadth, and fear so strong it makes him even sicker. 

He looks at Quentin and thinks, _I know you and I’m in love with you, but I don’t know if you’re in love with me_ and it feels out of place in this reality, where Quentin is one of his best friends, but it rings true in the fifty years that have settled into his bones without any warning. Not a second skin, just the same skin he’s had for so long, and underneath it thrumming familiar twin urges to hold Quentin and push him away, so much stronger than he’s ever felt them before.

“It was sort of beautiful,” Quentin says, seemingly oblivious to the thoughts racing through Eliot’s head.

But he’s right.

It had been beautiful, beautiful like a story, the way Eliot had loved and hurt and lived and raised a son, had a family. Everything he’d thought he’d never have or deserve, and still - still not enough. He looks at Quentin now, aching in some deep, unsatisfied, half-familiar way, and knows he’d lived with that ache for a lifetime. 

He can’t quite sort it all out in his head. The feelings are solid, but when he tries to find the reason behind them, it’s like grabbing fish from a creek. The memories slide and thrash, and if he could just focus for a minute -

But Quentin doesn’t wait - whatever memories have come back to him are making him so - so sure of things in a way that Eliot isn’t.

“Who gets that kind of proof of concept?”

 _Proof of concept_. Oh, there’s something in the phrase that makes Eliot want to agree immediately, makes him want to say _yes, we lived our best life together, yes_ and at the same time, pull back. _It wasn’t enough for me,_ he wants to say, _you gave me everything you could give and still I wanted more_. _Isn’t that proof that I’m not -_

And it had been another life. He could say that, that it had been somewhere so alien to where they are now, to where they’re going. They’d had fifty years without quests, without monsters, with normal human tragedy and triumph, and that’s never been their life here. He doesn’t think Quentin would even want it to be, not when he has a choice. 

“We were just injected with a half-century of emotion, so I get that maybe you’re not thinking clearly,” he says instead.

He knows that _he_ isn’t thinking clearly, anyway, because underneath every sensible reason his mind comes up with is his body’s desire to move close to Quentin’s, his fingers wanting to grasp his neck and hold him. Eliot wants to _have_ him, to push into his body and claim Quentin with his tongue, his fingers, his dick. He wants to _ruin_ him, to walk out of the room and have everyone, Margo and the fairies and the Floaters and fucking Tick Pickwick know that he’s the one Quentin has chosen, he wants-

“No, I’m saying - what if we gave it a shot?” The look on Quentin’s face hurts, like he can feel Eliot pulling himself away and doesn’t understand why. “Would it be that crazy?”

 _Oh_ , Eliot thinks, and he can’t make eye contact, can’t see Quentin being so impossibly brave and ignorant of everything, thinking he’s offering everything Eliot wants when he isn’t, he never could. 

“Why the fuck not?” Quentin asks.

Why the fuck not, indeed. His gut reaction to the question is so immediate and so pathetically honest that it makes him suspect he’s thought it before: _You never married me. You married Arielle, but you never married me_.

He doesn’t say that, though. Isn’t even sure what it means, although he can guess. Instead, he keeps it together by the tips of his fingernails and scrambles for the closest adjacent truth.

“I know you,” he starts, and that is true, absolutely, but what follows feels less so. “You aren’t-”

He’s saved from having to say it, from having to even define it, by Quentin’s interruption.

“What does it matter?”

“Don’t be naive, it matters. Q, c’mon.” He can see hurt cresting on Quentin’s face, and something argumentative as well, and it makes him panic in a burn-the-whole-place-down way. “I love you, but you have to know that that’s not me, and that’s definitely not you. Not when we have a choice.”

He wants to take the words back even before he says them, the confession just as much as the denial, but it’s too late.

“Okay,” Q says, looking away from him, down at the floor. “I - okay.”

Eliot has to look down as well, trying not to see the way Quentin has been diminished right before his eyes.

“Sorry,” Quentin says quietly, and Eliot clenches his jaw and thinks, _so am I._

-

When he blinks back to awareness of the room around him, his face is wet with tears, slipping against the glass. It’s not the first time he’s relived that memory in painful technicolor. The first time he’d been able to stop it, though, to end the scene with hope and promise.

It’s hard to square how he’d felt then, just moments away from breaking out, with how he feels now. He hadn’t lost his hope all at once, but those weeks he’d spent with just Margo and Lipson for company, Quentin gone and everyone else shrinking at the fact of his body, well. His grand daydreams of coming back to himself and making everything right with Quentin had been seriously deflated by that, and the memories he has to wade through every other hour had done the rest of the work.

It still hurts, even though he knows with great detail now what he hadn’t known then: all the ways Quentin had and hadn’t loved him, and all the decades Eliot had lived with the idea that he wanted more than Quentin was willing to give. The idea that things could be better this time around had been almost unfathomable before the Monster did - whatever it’s done. 

_History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme_. Eliot had gone out with a TA in the mandatory history class in undergrad who liked to say that, and he’d always thought it was a little facile, then. He gets it now, can’t help but see the irony of living with the same thing he’d lived with at the Mosaic: the knowledge that he will always want Quentin, regardless of whether Quentin will ever touch him again. 

\--

(Truthfully, the fact of his wanting has always paled in comparison to its bastard relation, love. 

He has been in love with Quentin for a very long time, and has loved him even longer. It seems almost funny now, that the moment he’d regretted most in those first few days after rejecting Quentin was when he’d told Quentin that he loved him. He’d let it slip out so easily, like it was _nothing_ , just a natural expression of the rhythm of his heartbeat, fifty years of emotion revealing themselves as being embedded in his very bones. 

If he could be sure that Quentin felt the same way about any of it then maybe it’d be easier to face his memories - or Quentin himself. But after the Monster, after the hospital, after their conversation - after all of it, he doesn’t know. Quentin’s face had been closed off, so unfamiliarly opaque. He just doesn’t know.)

\--

He walks into the small dining hall with one hand clenched into a fist, the sharp pain of his fingernails digging into his palm a distraction from both the ache in his gut and the way his heart keeps trying to beat with uncomfortable hope. It’s only mildly successful; Margo looks up at him when he comes in and makes a face that says she can tell he’s hurting.

Quentin is there, studiously not making eye contact with anyone, and so is Tick, but Fen isn’t. Eliot thinks, taking a seat by Margo, that maybe that’s why her face looks so drawn. It’s both a welcome and unwelcome thought: he’s desperate to return to the days when he wasn’t Margo’s greatest problem, but he doesn’t want Fen to just come and replace him, either.

“Everything alright, Bambi?” he asks. She pushes a basket of dark bread towards him and doesn’t say anything.

He takes the hint and applies himself to dinner, instead. It’s just a Fillorian beet soup, like a thin borscht, with bread and honey that’s been whipped together with butter - the kind of thing he and Quentin used to make, back when -

Back then. Back never. He takes a bite of bread and chews it until it’s a tasteless paste, and wishes that he could get through one meal without wanting to run away from things.

Quentin is sitting on the other side of the table, but close to the end, by Tick. They appear to have cornered each other into a conversation about the history of Fillorian diplomacy with the furthest of the Western Isles, neither looking particularly enthused about it. He watches Quentin pick at the bread and cradle his soup bowl in his hands without eating any of it, just soaking up the warmth.

Margo’s spoon hits the bottom of her bowl with a muted clatter, metal on wood. He looks at her out of the corner of his eye, trying to evaluate where she’s at, and realizes with no small amount of regret that it’s been a while since he really checked in with her. It’s been her reaching out to him, over and over, ever since he woke up in the hospital. She’s talked about Quentin, about how she’d missed him, but Margo has always been much more than the sum of her relationships with men. He needs to make this right.

“Wine?” he offers, already filling her cup with whatever’s in the wire-wrapped carafe on the table. He tops up his own for good measure, and pushes his chair back with a tut - easier than actually manipulating his body to do it, currently. Now he’s angled towards her, and Quentin is barely in his line of sight. 

She takes a long, long draw, then pushes back her chair to mirror Eliot’s.

“It’s been a long fuckin’ day,” she sighs, leaning back a little.

“Tell me about it,” he says, which disquiets her, for some reason.

She looks at him, tilts her head and keeps looking. It’s a careful, evaluative gaze, taking all of him in and letting nothing out. Eventually she drinks again and looks away.

“It’s funny, we’ve been spending every night together, and being all kinds of stupid, but somehow I’m still surprised that you’re really here.” Her tone is perfectly even, but he can see the subtle tremble of her mouth, her greatest tell.

“I’m here,” he says gently, giving her an opening.

Margo sighs, then says, “Fen tried to, I don’t know. Ask me out. Propose to me? Although that was mostly by accident, I think. Anyway, she came on to me, earlier. When you were with Q.”

That’s - surprising, but then, maybe it shouldn’t be. Fen had featured suspiciously often in Margo’s ‘Shit You Missed’ stories. 

“What did you say?” he asks, and she snorts and shakes her head, but seemingly more at herself than him.

“What do you think? I said no. She’s the High King.”

“We’ve all been High King, Bambi. What’s that have to do with it?”

“It has everything to do with it,” she says, loudly enough that he sees Tick glance over at them.

“I don’t want to undermine her,” Margo continues, more quietly. “She’s managed to appease the FU Fighters, but things are still fragile. It doesn’t help that she’s been so tangled up with us, and that I’m on the council. If word got out that we were fucking…”

“Then everyone would think she was a puppet,” Eliot guesses. It makes a certain kind of sense; aside from the talking animals, the ‘Fillory for Fillorians, by Fillorians’ groups were the most politically active. They were the ones you really didn’t want to piss off if you were trying to avoid death by a thousand pokes.

“Did you want to say yes?” That’s the more important question, to him, anyway. Leave the politics to Tick and the rest; if Eliot doesn’t have a position, then he gets to ignore the game.

Margo doesn’t answer at first. She looks down at her lap and sighs through her nose. She’s wearing a thick wool jacket over her dress; it should look ridiculous, but on Margo it works. She looks like a disheveled queen, her hair falling over her shoulders in waves and curls. She’d stopped straightening it, he realizes, while he’d been gone.

“I think so,” she admits, finally, low. “I -“

She stops, looks up at him, eyes wide and expression a strange mix of defensive and pleading.

“She really matters,” Margo says, like each word is costing her.

“And you weren’t expecting it?” he asks, but it’s purely rhetorical. 

He and Bambi are two of a kind, of course she wasn’t expecting it. They don’t expect to find people they can trust. They hadn’t expected each other, or Quentin. Neither of them had expected the ragtag group they’d been a part of for one hot minute, before everything turned to shit - whenever that had been. And after everything, too; it’s strange, now that he thinks about it, how much he misses all of them. Even Alice. Even (if only a little, and mostly for Quentin’s sake), Julia.

“She’s mad that I said no,” Margo says. “Not that I said no, but why. She thinks I don’t respect her ability to rule or some shit.”

“Well,” Eliot starts, careful, “you did just tell me that you think you’d undermine her authority.”

“Because I would! Am I the only person who remembers that the whole concept of monarchy is on thin fucking ice right now?” Margo says. “Do you remember getting deposed? Because I sure as fuck do. Both times, actually. If you think half the barons and minor lords from here to the goddamn beetle islands aren’t just waiting to swoop in and declare Fen a mouthpiece for ‘the Children of Earth’ then you haven’t been paying attention.”

He hasn’t, but something in him still wants to rise to defend himself at the accusation that he, of all people, doesn’t care about Fillory.

…Which is how she’s probably feeling, too.

He finishes his wine and fills their cups again. Sneaks a look over at the other side of the table and sees that Tick has left. Quentin’s gone over to the fireplace at the end of the room where he’s leaning against the mantel in an uncharacteristically broody way. Fires to put out, everywhere he looks. It’s like being High King again, if he’d been playing High King on an afternoon soap.

Margo turns to follow his gaze and snorts at Quentin’s pose.

“He looks like you,” she says, turning back at him with a more cheerful, if mocking glint in her eye.

“Please, I pull that look off with a lot more ease,” he says, although he’s not opposed to Quentin playing broody hero on occasion. “Don’t distract me, we’re figuring out how to solve your girl problems.”

“I don’t have girl problems,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I have ‘nobody will recognize that I’m making good points’ problems.”

He raises his eyebrows at her, until she admits, “Which is a classic girl problem.”

“Exactly. So, Fen.”

“Fen,” Margo echoes, deadpan.

“Well, in the words of improbably hot teen Heath Ledger, do y’like the girl? Is she worth all this trouble?”

“That’s not a bad Heath, actually,” she says, and he preens a little. “I don’t know, probably. Fuck, I think so. I already like her, the damage is done.”

“Great. Then we just have to figure out a PR plan. Get you back in the FU Fighters’ good graces, lean on your popularity with the talking animals. Let Fen do some very un-you, real down-to Fillory stuff. Give it a few months, maybe a year, and people will be fine when they find out she’s getting the strap from an Earthling.”

“Jesus, Eliot,” Margo says, all mock appall and genuine delight. She kicks out at his leg with one pointed shoe, but can’t quite reach it.

“Like you haven’t thought about it,” he rejoins.

“Mm, I might have. Once or twice,” she says, looking up at him from under her eyelashes and that’s familiar, albeit from a long time ago. Getting each other worked up by talking about someone else was an old Brakebills classic.

“I’m not going to fuck her with you,” he says, which is maybe broaching the topic too early, but he might as well get it out of the way. “It’s just, it’s Fen.”

“I know, El,” Margo says, rolling her eyes. “I did live with the two of you, as you recall.”

“Yeah, well,” he says, feeling a little defensive. “We never really talked about it.”

“We didn’t need to,” she tells him. “I get it. I’m the only woman for you, et cetera, et cetera.”

“No one else compares,” he says, more seriously than he meant to, but absolutely truthfully. 

Margo accuses him of being a sap, but she looks pleased, and Eliot realizes that it relaxes something in him, all the back-and-forth and the planning and the way he can always rely on Margo to be, well. Margo.

“Well, now that we’ve dealt with my drama,” Margo starts, and he looks over reflexively at Quentin, who is still brooding by the fire.

“Time for mine?”

“Actually, I was gonna say, time for bed,” Margo says. “But how are things with our favorite depressed supernerd? Did you talk?”

“A little,” he says reluctantly, suddenly glum at the prospect of having to face his own problems. “Would it be melodramatic if I suggested that he hates me?”

“He doesn’t hate you, El. Drop the self-pity routine. He has depression and he’s exhausted. And you probably said something stupid that didn’t help anything.”

“A couple things,” he admits, and she nods as though to say, of course.

“Just don’t push things,” she advises.

“Now,” she says, standing up and addressing both him and Q, who glances over at them, “I’m going to bed. You guys clean up, and play nice.”

“Clean up? Being deposed royalty just doesn’t get the perks it used to,” Eliot laments, but he does as she says, dropping a kiss on her forehead as she leaves and then stacking the bowls on the table. Quentin’s, he notes, is still mostly full.

Quentin doesn’t come over at first, stays over by the fireplace and watches Eliot without saying a word. Anything else is a bonus, Eliot reminds himself, but he has never been good at not wanting, and it’s only taken a minute for the shine of just being in the same room as Quentin to become not enough.

He half-expects Quentin to stand there, silent and still, until Eliot leaves, but when he leans across the table to grab Tick’s cup and lets out a huff of pain as the movement pulls at his wound, Quentin practically leaps into action.

“Let me carry the bowls,” he says, and then he’s right next to Eliot, just half a foot away, if that, picking up the stack of bowls with one hand. He grabs the empty breadbasket and sticks it under his arm, then reconsiders, puts the cups into it, and finally cradles it all against his chest with clumsy, determined strength.

Eliot should be angry, should be pushing back the desire to snap at Quentin like he’d snapped at Margo earlier for the crime of acknowledging his pain and wanting it to lessen. But he isn’t, he can’t be, because his body is buzzing just at Quentin’s proximity. He stands next to Eliot as though the closeness is nothing. As though this body has only ever been gentle to him. It doesn’t mean anything, but it’s still making Eliot’s head spin.

He snaps out of it when Quentin laughs, a tiny shred of self-deprecating noise, and says, “I don’t actually know where these are supposed to go.”

“Kitchen,” Eliot says, almost gasping the word out, and that’s - that’s -

He has to get himself under control. He lets himself have one second to tense every muscle in his body, tells himself _he’s here_ and _chill the fuck out_ , then relaxes and grabs the only thing left on the table - the small pile of heavy cloth napkins.

“Kitchen,” he says, and this time it comes out evenly, almost nonchalant. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

\--

Whitespire’s kitchen is, in direct opposition to the rest of the castle, actually warm. Eliot guesses that’s because of the fire roaring in the massive fireplace, which looks like it was built to roast wild boar and cook comically large cauldrons of soup over. The kitchen itself is also huge, filled with gleaming copper pots and pans and wide expanses of stone countertop, and the way the light flickers across every surface makes Eliot feel as though he’s walked into a vast cave.

There aren’t any sinks in sight, something Quentin must realize as well, because he lets the dishes clatter out of his arms and onto the nearest counter. 

“So...is everyone gone?” he asks, looking around the room. 

“All the people with sense,” Eliot says. “Fen offered to send them home if they didn’t want to winter here, so there’s just a skeleton crew right now. Hence why we’re eating bread and soup instead of…”

He trails off, gesturing in a way that’s meant to recall the absurdly complex dishes he’d coaxed, bribed, and threatened out of the chefs during his royal tenure.

“I thought that was just what Fen likes,” Quentin says, walking over to the fireplace just like he had in the dining hall. Eliot wonders if it’s because he’s cold, even immersed in the heat of the kitchen, or if he knows that he looks fucking heartbreaking with the firelight dancing across his face. Knowing Quentin, it’s the former.

“Maybe,” Eliot allows. He hadn’t thought of that; if it weren’t for Margo’s pointed stares and elbowing, he’d forget that Fen was really, truly the High King now. It makes sense, though, that she’d set a menu of food she likes. He feels a little embarrassed for not having realized that.

“She’s nice,” Quentin murmurs. “I never realized that before. I don’t think we ever had a conversation before today, just the two of us.”

“She tell you anything embarrassing about me?” Eliot quips, realizing as he says it that he has the napkins from dinner balled up in his fist, still. He squeezes them and watches Quentin’s profile, looking for - something. Anything.

Quentin shrugs one shoulder, the flesh one, and doesn’t look at him. “Nothing I didn’t already know.”

Jesus fuck, Eliot thinks, it’s like trying to get blood from a stone. He tosses the napkins onto the counter behind him and leans against it, trying not to think about the cane Lipson had made him bring. It’s under his bed, currently. He’d shoved it under there the second he’d had a moment to himself. He wishes he had it now.

 _Don’t push things,_ Margo had said. He doesn’t want to push things, but Quentin is giving him nothing, nothing to work with. He has to push, just a little.

“Can I ask you something?”

Quentin glances at him, expression guarded, then shrugs again. “That’s where this is headed, isn’t it?”

Eliot smiles at him, a tight-lipped smile that he doesn’t even see, as he’s returned to looking at down at the fire. He sorts through the questions filling his head, and the one that finally emerges feels reasonable enough.

“Where were you when I was in the hospital?”

“I was in the hospital,” Quentin answers without hesitation. “Well, a different hospital.”

Fuck. Fuck, of course he had been. Exhausted and depressed, that’s how Margo had described him. 

“The hospital,” he echoes dumbly, and for some reason that makes Quentin’s shoulders tense. He looks tired and small and a million miles away, and Eliot just - Eliot wants -

“You don’t have to tell me-” he starts, which is true, literally, but somehow feels like a lie when he says it.

“No, I’ll tell you,” Quentin says, finally turning towards him. “It’s not - it wasn’t supposed to be some big secret.”

“Margo wouldn’t tell me,” Eliot says, and a faint smile crosses Quentin’s face at that.

“I think she’s a little weird about it, still. Julia was weird about it too, the first few times. Most people don’t have friends who get admitted to locked wards, do they?”

This time Eliot is the one who gets to shrug, because, well. He’s known people - not friends, not how he thinks of friends now. But people, back in undergrad. He thinks, distantly, that he had almost been one of them - would’ve been, if the right person had found him.

“I was in there for a few weeks,” Quentin says, finally keeping hold of the conversational ball. “Margo and Julia brought me, and I thought - well. I went along with it. And then I wanted to leave, but the doctors wouldn’t - I wasn’t passing the tests to get out, you know? You have to know the right answers, but you also have to be convincing about it, and I just wasn’t. Not for a while.”

That, Eliot knows. He knows what it’s like to ask Quentin if he’s okay and not trust the answer. He remembers - after Arielle’s death, the unwelcoming fog of autumn descending and Quentin sitting out on the wet grass half the night, until Eliot woke up and - he remembers -

“Eliot?”

He blinks twice, and finds that Quentin has come closer, is now standing right on the other side of the island counter, only four feet away if that. His face is crumpled with quiet concern, mouth and eyebrows and the lines of him all downturned. It’s the most emotion Eliot’s seen on from him all day.

“I’m fine,” Eliot says, and if he ignores the thickness in his throat and the persistent fucking ache in his gut, it’s almost true. “Margo said that you were - that things weren’t great,” he starts, and then realizes he doesn’t know where to go. He wonders if this is what Quentin means by ‘being weird about it.’ 

“Yeah, that would be an understatement,” Quentin says dryly, the worry on his face lessening as it becomes clear that Eliot is, well. Himself, probably. “Like I said, it’s not a secret.”

He pauses, one hand absently going to tuck too-short hair behind his ear and hovering there when he realizes it’s not long enough. He smiles a little self-deprecatingly at Eliot and Eliot finds himself responding in kind automatically, the part of him that’s hardwired to make Quentin smile easing a little.

“It wasn’t just the Monster,” he starts. “That was, mm. Really bad. But it wasn’t just that, it was. Fuck, it feels stupid saying it aloud. Okay, so, you know how my brain breaks sometimes?”

It’s a rhetorical question, but Eliot nods anyway because he knows, he _knows_.

Quentin bites his lip, but it seems like a tactic meant to give him time to organize his thoughts rather than delay the conversation. He lets out a breath.

“So, um. I’ve always had a bad time after like, finishing terms in college. I’d turn in my last paper and just sort of collapse. The only reason I’d even get out of bed during breaks is because Julia was there to drag me outside. It’s dumb, because that’s supposed to be the time to take a break, you know? But I would just totally fall apart, because I’d spent months pushing myself to keep going. I’d tell myself I couldn’t be depressed during the term because I had to go to class and write papers and be mildly functional. But once I’d finished doing all of those things, I just. Couldn’t see any other reason to keep going.”

Oh, Eliot can see where this is headed, and he hates it. But he can see it all building up in Quentin, the whole story, so he just looks at him, studying the details of his face. The soft stubble on his cheeks, the circles under his eyes. The way his shirt hangs off of him, loose to the point of being baggy. 

Quentin scrubs a hand across his face, and Eliot sees his throat move, soundless.

“I spent - god, I spent months focused on getting you back. As soon as I was myself again, it was all I thought about. The only time I stopped thinking about it was the day the Monster told me you were dead.”

Eliot twitches at that, at all the pain hiding in that sentence, but he stays silent. He aches to rest his hand on the curve of his jaw, to wrap himself around Quentin, to give him a place to be warm and quiet and safe. And he could, he could but - that’s not what his body is, anymore. Not safe. Not for Quentin.

“That was the only time,” Quentin says, and he looks - indescribable, Eliot cannot physically bring himself to describe that look, “Just that one day where I thought - I thought maybe I would never see you again-”

“But you did,” Eliot finally says, because Quentin is close to tears and that’s really the final straw. No matter what the Monster did, no matter what Eliot has done, he can’t just stand there and do nothing, say nothing, while Quentin fucking cries over him. “You saved me. I’m here, Q, I’m right here.”

“I know,” Quentin says, and something approximating a laugh emerges, damply, from his mouth, “I know. That was the problem.”

Oh. 

“The problem,” Eliot says flatly, which makes Quentin flinch again and fuck, of course that was the problem. Of course _he_ was the problem. He has to - he needs to leave, he needs to get out of here, away from Quentin and everyone else whom he hurt so badly with his voice and his face and his fucking hands and his body, his body. 

He tries to stand up straight to go and his knees buckle almost immediately, sending him crashing to the floor. He manages to catch himself on elbows and knees, but the sudden motion makes something twist very painfully in his gut, forcing a noise out of his throat that makes him flush with humiliation at the way his body just keeps betraying him. 

Quentin comes around the island quickly, crouching down by his side with one hand hovering over his shoulder, miles away in its hesitance.

“El, what’s wrong?” he asks, and under the pain and nausea and guilt Eliot loves him so much, loves this man who can’t bear to be in the same room as him but still, still, wants to help him.

He tries to tell him that, says, “Q, don’t,” while attempting to push himself up, but he only succeeds on sending another wave of pain through his body. 

“Stop moving,” Quentin says, voice insistent and clipped, “You’re hurting yourself, just - just lie down on the floor for a second.”

Eliot isn’t a huge proponent of lying on floors, especially kitchen floors in castles, but it’s obviously the only option he has. He slowly eases himself down onto his back, trying to ignore Quentin’s worried gaze.

Lying prone on flagstone that he desperately hopes someone swept before they went to bed, he’s in the perfect place to see Quentin settle onto his knees, just inches away.

“You can go,” he says, ignoring the way the statement is rendered absurd by his current position. 

“Jesus, Eliot, I’m not going anywhere. Did you tear anything?”

He looks worried, and he sounds worried, and it makes Eliot feel sick, and cared for, and guilty for both of those feelings.

“Stitches are out,” he manages to say, “So if I did -”

“Then it’s internal. Fuck.”

Quentin edges closer, like he’s going to try and lift up Eliot’s shirt and see for himself.

“I don’t think I did,” Eliot says, “It’s been hurting all day.”

“You’re pushing yourself too hard,” Quentin says quietly, and Eliot tries to shrug but he can’t quite manage it.

For a moment the room is almost silent. Eliot closes his eyes against Quentin’s persistent concern, and listens to the fire. The coolness of the floor contrasts pleasantly with the warmth of the room, and if he ignores the waves of shooting pain it’s almost nice, just lying there.

And then the near-silence stretches, and Eliot can’t actually convince himself that breaking it would be worth the cost of having to move, even minutely. It’s not quite awkward, not to him, but then he thinks his perspective might be skewed. He’d spent a long time without any silence when he was stuck in his own mind, just living through memory after memory with Charlton’s occasional judgmental questions in-between. He hadn’t realized until then how loud his life was - how loud _he_ was, in those years between childhood and Fillory, taking up space with a determination that, in a repeat viewing, came off as a little desperate. Insecure, desperately insecure and only able to shed it around Margo. But there had been so many years before Margo…

He jerks up, eyes flying open, at the feeling of damp cloth against his forehead. Quentin is staring at him, hand extended towards him, and he’s holding one of the napkins from dinner.

“You were sweating,” Quentin says by way of explanation, looking a little - flushed. From the fire, probably.

“Did I fall asleep?” Eliot asks, because his back is screaming that he had, but he doesn’t remember even a single dream. 

“I think so,” Quentin says, hand falling to his side. “Just for a few minutes. I didn’t mean to wake you up, it’s just. Um. We should probably get you back to your actual bed.”

Eliot groans at that, half-performative and half-genuine dread at the prospect of, once again, hobbling his way up the stairs to his rooms.

“I was thinking about how to do it, and - do you remember that air cushion spell? If we modify it with Popper 14, I think we could push it, so you won’t have to walk.”

“That...is an excellent idea,” Eliot admits. It really was; how had he not thought of it?

“I like having problems to solve,” Quentin says, shrugging. “Keeps me from thinking too much.”

Problems. Right.

“Well, let’s give it a go,” Eliot says, as casually as he can manage. “And if it doesn’t work, feel free to let me keep sleeping on the floor.”

“If it doesn’t work, then we’ll figure out something else,” Quentin says, and Eliot almost smiles at the quiet determination in his voice.

As Quentin tuts out the spell, Eliot lets himself think, for one overwhelming moment, _I love you_. Then he pushes the thought down. _All things have a season, Waugh_ , he tells himself. He’s had his season of loving Quentin. Now is the season of getting the fuck off the floor.

\--

The bag that Fen grabbed is full of bitter, chocolatey things that she vaguely remembers Josh describing as nibs, or nubs, something like that. She eats quite a few of them while curled up on her bed, then realizes she never grabbed a spoon for the jam.

She almost, almost eats it with her fingers, but. She’s High King, and that sounds exactly like the kind of thing she really shouldn’t do. She’s tempted to use one of the conveniently spoon-shaped hair pins gifted to her by the Baron of Windlewell, but that seems almost as inappropriate. Instead, she makes herself get up.

She plans on going to the kitchen, which she imagines Quentin and Eliot have probably left, by now, but she only makes it to the top of the stairwell when she hears Eliot and Quentin’s voices coming from just a few stairs and a corner below.

“Fuck!” he’s saying, “There’s an angle there, just - be careful, don’t bump into anything.”

“I’m trying,” Quentin says, “it’s just really tight. I think you might be too big to fit without -”

“I’m not doing that,” Eliot says, “seriously, my knees would not cooperate with that.”

“Fine, then let me just push a little harder,” Quentin says, and oh, they - in the stairwell?

Fen supposes they probably expected it to stay empty, given how few people are in the castle, which would be a fair assumption. She’s surprised, just a little, but more at their timing than the fact of their coupling. Both of them looked worn down and exhausted, and she knows Eliot is in pain quite often. She understands, though, the desire to celebrate whatever peace they’ve found after being separated for so long. 

She leaves quickly after that, just catching the fading edge of Eliot saying, “Well, it was your idea!” in a tone that would be annoyed were it not so tempered by fondness. Fen feels almost like she should wish them luck, but Eliot’s quite resourceful, so she knows they’ll figure it out eventually.

In the meantime, she’s going to have to use one of the hairpins for the jam. Or maybe, she thinks, maybe Margo has a spoon. 

Probably not, and then again, she’s not sure she’s ready to just march into Margo’s rooms and fight, or make up, or both. She’ll have to, eventually, because Margo historically has not taken the initiative on apologies, but not tonight. Tonight, she’ll eat jam out of a jar and watch the snow, and read the latest infrastructure reports. 

Margo can wait until tomorrow.

\--

The spell works. Not flawlessly, but just as Quentin intended it to, Eliot thinks, because he manages to get Eliot up to his rooms without having to touch him even once. Any feelings he might have about that, however, pale in comparison to the sheer joy of not having to stumble, step by agonizing step, through the castle.

“I’m fucking patenting that spell,” Eliot breathes, lying on his bed. Quentin is standing close by, starting to look fidgety now that he’s solved the problem, but he snorts at that.

“Well, first off, it’s my spell,” he says, “and second, I don’t think spell patents exist.”

“They definitely do,” Eliot says, “How many spells have we learned that have someone’s name attached to them? That’s a patent.”

“That’s not what a patent is,” Quentin starts, but he stops and smiles, shaking his head, when Eliot laughs at him. “Dick.”

It feels good to make Quentin smile, like stretching out a muscle. Addictive, maybe, and Eliot already has a rejoinder coming out of his mouth when he realizes that he should stop trying to get things from Quentin and just let him leave. His aborted “Well, you-” hangs in the air. The smile drops off of Quentin’s face.

Eliot busies himself tutting the spell to light the fire in the fireplace. He never should’ve let it go out; the room is just a few degrees warmer than the hallway, which had been absurdly cold. 

“You should go,” he says, looking down at his hands. “The fire in your room’s probably gone out too.”

“I - yeah,” Quentin says, tone indecipherable. “Okay. Good night, El.”

Eliot turns his head just in time to see the door close, Quentin on the other side of it, and feels a grim sort of satisfaction. It dissipates almost immediately as his wardrobe catches his eye and he realizes that he’s still wearing his outfit for dinner. He’ll need to change, which means he’ll need to move, which absolutely no part of his body wants to do. Also, the murderous fuck possessing his body made Quentin’s brain break, and Quentin hasn’t recovered from that on a number of levels. 

So, more than a few things are fucked.

\--

Despite using every relevant spell he can think of, getting into his pajamas still ends up being a mildly agonizing affair. Eliot almost breaks some sort of decorative bowl by accident, falls off the bed twice, and permanently vanishes his undershirt while casting Herrold’s Relocation. 

It’s the sort of comedy of errors that he expects to see happen to someone else; the exact series of events that should never, _would_ never happen to Eliot Waugh. It’s yet another humiliation in a night full of them, and, given how much he has to move around, painful as well.

All this to say, when someone knocks on the door his first instinct is to pretend he’s asleep, because he has zero intention of letting himself be seen as he is. Eliot Waugh lounges. He reclines. He does not lie exhaustedly underneath a pile of blankets, propped up by pillows. 

Then he realizes that it’s probably Margo with wine, and relaxes.

“Please tell me you brought wine,” he calls.

“...I didn’t,” says someone who definitely isn’t Margo.

The door opens two seconds later, and Quentin shuffles into the room.

“Did you forget something?” Eliot asks, knowing full well that he didn’t.

“Um, sort of,” Quentin says. He’s clearly anxious, eyes darting around the room like he’s seeing it for the first time, and Eliot notices him subtly dig his thumb into his palm. “I can’t get a fire lit in my room, for some reason, and it’s really fucking cold, but that’s not why I came back.”

Eliot raises his eyebrows, and waits for Quentin to answer the obvious question. Quentin edges a little closer to the bed, further away from the door, and hums prevaricatingly for a moment.

“I didn’t finish telling you about the hospital,” he finally says, looking at Eliot.

“Q, you don’t have to,” Eliot says quietly. He wants Quentin to talk about this shit, he really does, but Eliot is - he’s exhausted. He’s gotten an answer to the question he’s been asking since he opened his eyes in the Brakebills infirmary, and it would be good to have a night to figure out how to live with it.

“I do, though,” Quentin sighs, “I do, because I didn’t - I think you might’ve gotten the wrong impression.”

“Trust me, I didn’t,” Eliot says, a chill sweeping through him. He knows what this is now, it’s Quentin coming to tell him that he needs more space from Eliot. _We’ll be friends again_ , Quentin will say, earnestly meaning it, _but right now I can’t -_

“I think you did,” Quentin says sharply, “because you won’t make eye contact with me, and you’re acting like - whatever, just. Can you let me finish?”

And what can Eliot do but nod, and feel glad when Quentin sits on the edge of the bed, facing away from Eliot, so he can close his eyes to the world and feel slightly less bad about it.

“When I said saving you was the problem,” Quentin starts, “I didn’t mean that you were the problem.”

Eliot means to be quiet and just let him say whatever he’s going to say, but he’s just. He’s tired, and every part of him aches, and he just can’t bring himself to be patient about Quentin’s attempts to reject him on every level while trying to be nice about it.

“Right,” he says, letting incredulity bleed through his tone, “and that’s why you haven’t been avoiding me. It’s not that I’m the problem, it’s just that you look at me and see the Monster-“

“You didn’t let me finish!” Quentin says, sounding frustrated and - something else. Eliot opens his eyes just to glance at him, and sees that he’s curled around himself, shoulders hunched. Even as he watches, Quentin shivers, then shifts so he’s facing him. 

“Did you miss the part where I told you my brain fucking breaks? I spent months trying to rescue you, Eliot. _Months_. It was all I cared about. The Monster killed people and I cared, at first, but I did _nothing_ , because I was afraid that if I did, it would kill you too. And then eventually I stopped caring about - about the people it killed, the way it was hurting all of us. All I cared about was getting you back. It could’ve killed me, almost did more than once, and when I let myself think about that I would get upset but only. Only because it would lower the chances that you’d be saved.”

It clicks, then. It clicks, and Eliot feels - he pushes himself up on his elbows, suppressing a wince as he does, because he can’t. He can’t say this lying down.

“You wanted to die,” he says. He feels nauseous and desperate with the need to touch Quentin, to confirm the fact of him, warm and breathing and flushed with upset and _alive_.

“I didn’t care if I died,” Quentin corrects, voice low. “I couldn’t. I thought I’d go back to - to normal, you know, afterwards, but then Margo sliced you open and we got the Monster out, and I stopped caring about anything at all.”

He takes a shuddering breath, puts his hands over his face for a moment and says nothing. Eliot thinks he can see his shoulder blades pushing sharply against his shirt, and he wishes for impossible things.

“I did come to visit you in the hospital, you know,” Quentin murmurs, finally letting his hands fall away. “The very first day you were in there, I came to see you. I sat by your bed after Lipson stabilized you, and I held your hand, and I couldn’t feel anything. Not happy, not relieved. I felt like I didn’t exist anymore. Or, like I didn’t need to exist. The one time I could pull it together enough, I just hated myself for not being - normal.”

“You’ve never been normal,” Eliot says weakly. “I’ve never cared. I wouldn’t have cared, Q, I really wouldn’t have. I just wanted to see you.”

It’s selfish and absurd, he knows, but despite everything he can’t help but feel that if only he’d _seen_ Quentin, been there for him, maybe things could’ve been okay. 

Quentin just shakes his head.

“I would’ve cared,” Quentin tells him. “And so would you. You don’t know how bad it was. _Margo_ freaked out, she was the one who called Julia and said that I - that something was wrong. She thought I was, I don’t know, fucked up on emotion magic. And then Julia got there and knew I needed to go to the hospital. Because it’s dangerous, when you don’t feel anything. But it’s so much worse when it comes back, and you get the ability to - to do something.”

Eliot’s heart sinks at those words, at ‘do something.’“So it helped. Being in the hospital.”

“It helped to be somewhere where I couldn’t hurt myself,” Quentin says. “Sometimes that’s all that matters. But it’s,” he pauses, then continues with a careful deliberateness, “I haven’t found hospitals to be very helpful beyond that. Once I knew I wasn’t at risk of doing something stupid, I started trying to get myself discharged. I had to make plans, you know, for afterwards. Julia and I were going to get an apartment, and Kady gave me the number for a therapist who works with a lot of magicians. I thought I could get better, and then I could be a - a good friend to you. But it didn’t happen that way. I walked out the doors and fell into Fillory, instead.”

He looks right at Eliot and says, seriously and gently, “I wasn’t ready. But it’s not because I look at you and see the Monster. It’s not because I can’t stand you. It’s because I wanted to die, and I’m still finding my way off that particular ledge.”

Eliot looks back at him and sees it, that pure sincerity that he’s seen so often in Quentin’s face. It mends something in him, and breaks something else, to see that look. 

He looks at Quentin and, for once, can’t bring himself to disbelieve him.

“I believe you,” he says, “and I’m really glad you’re - fuck, that you’re alive, Q. You have no idea.”

“I think I have some idea,” Quentin says, a soft, sad expression on his face. “I’m very glad that you’re alive too.”

They look at each other for a long moment, until Quentin looks away again, awkwardness surfacing in his face.

“I wasn’t, uh, I wasn’t joking about the fireplace in my room,” he says, “Like, it wasn’t a line or something. I thought - I don’t know if there’s another room, or…”

He trails off, and Eliot considers things for not as long as he should, probably, then flips back the covers.

“Just sleep here,” he says, careful to keep his tone light and friendly and completely absent of any kind of ‘I’m in love with you’ vibes. “We’ll sort out your room in the morning. It’s late, you’re here, _my_ fireplace works, so. Just sleep here.”

“Well, if you’re sure,” Quentin says, and he looks relieved, more than anything else, which makes Eliot feel a little better about it all.

“Extremely,” Eliot says, which is overstating his confidence a bit, but he genuinely can’t stand the idea of sending Quentin away to some cold, dark room to sleep by himself, so. He’s _fairly_ sure about it.

Quentin casts Herrold’s Relocation with ease, because of course he does, and gets under the blankets wearing a t-shirt and boxer-briefs that Eliot assumes he must’ve been wearing when he left the hospital. He lets out a sigh, and says, “It’s really nice not to be cold,” with such contentment that Eliot can’t help but smile.

“It is,” he says, settling down into the pillows. It’s a big bed, big enough that they won’t touch even accidentally. Which is good, must be. He doesn’t think - despite what Quentin has said, he doesn’t think the Monster has been entirely banished from memory. How could it be?

It’s exorcised enough, though, for Quentin to give him an exhausted smile and curl up on his side, falling asleep so quickly that it’d surprise Eliot if he hadn’t seen Quentin fall asleep with the same suddenness during many post(-ish) depressive episodes in their other life.

He’d never seen it from this distance, of course. It hurts in a strange, half-remembered way, knowing it wouldn’t help to touch Quentin, but that’s a way he can live with. The distance of it is almost pleasant compared to the immediacy of all his other physical pain. But the warmth of the room, and the firm mattress, and the way he runs through the relaxation exercises that Lipson taught him help ease that pain, and it’s not long before he joins Quentin in sleep, head still turned towards him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter: Quentin is cuddled. Margo drinks hot chocolate.
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> [tumblr](https://leguin.tumblr.com)  
> [dreamwidth](https://patrokla.dreamwidth.org/)

**Works inspired by this one:**

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